Judgement in Politics: Responses to International Insecurity from Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant

Abstract

My paper compares a few of the key issues of Hannah Arendt’s and Immanuel Kant’s account on IR by revisiting the controversial reading she offered on § 40‒41 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It claims that by focusing closely on their parallel insights concerning the insecurity inherent to the supranational level of politics which was called by Arendt “the world” and by Kant “the cosmopolitan community of mankind”, one can argue for her thesis on the high political relevance of the theory of judgement based on what Kant labelled as sensus communis in his aesthetics.
Kant held that political stability in national political communities is part and parcel of the upcoming emergence of an overall rule of the law on the global scale, while Arendt convincingly proved that totalitarianism (the formative experience of her thinking on human co-existence whatsoever) is a completely new and unprecedented form of government which substantially differs from other forms of governance. She also pointed out that this qualitative difference does not create a different world. The vulnerability of other, more traditional forms of governance is heightened by the advent of totalitarian politics exactly because of this unity in humans’ world.