Hannah Arendt: Legal Theory, Political Action and the Eichmann Trial

2017 | History & Politics

This book uses Hannah Arendt's controversial text Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil to examine major themes in contemporary jurisprudence, including the nature of law, legal authority, the duty of citizens, the nexus between morality and law and political action. Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political philosophy: strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox. After reporting on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Arendt embarked on a series of reflections about how to make judgements and exercise responsibility without recourse to existing law, especially when existing law is judged as immoral. The book uses her reporting and subsequent reflections, as well as the responses to her work, to examine these themes in the context of classical and current debates in legal-political theory.

Peter Burdon (Author)