ABSTRACT
The relationship between thoughtfulness and judgment is a persistent theme throughout Hannah Arendt's political writing. Following the Eichmann trial, Arendt's interest in judgment was further developed in a series of essays that considered the links between opinion, facts and deliberation and in her posthumously published lecture series on Kant's political philosophy. This chapter describes and contrasts two kinds of judgment. To begin it looks at the judgments handed down by the Israeli District and Supreme Courts. These judgments, which are bounded by the law and enforced through the State's assumed monopoly on violence, are both formal and narrow in scope. The chapter unpacks Arendt's performative judgment of Eichmann which she delivers at the end of her report. Arendt also considers judgment from the perspective of individual plurality and what it means to keep company with oneself.
