The Relevance of Hannah Arendt: On Judgement and Responsibility

Research 21: Engaging with ideas from the Faculty of the Professions. Peter Burdon from the Adelaide Law School discusses "The Relevance of Hannah Arendt: On Judgement and Responsibility" On 11 April 1961 the Israeli Government put the Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem. Following the Wannsee conference in 1942 Eichmann was given the task of organising the transportation of millions of Jews from occupied territories and into extermination camps. The trial was set-up by the Israeli prosecution to be not just a trial of Eichmann but also a 'bearing witness' of the holocaust itself. The prosecution called over 100 witnesses to testify, many of whom were survivors of the concentration camps. For fourteen weeks the trial made international headlines. One of the trial's most famous witnesses was the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political philosophy: strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox. After the trial of 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 contrary to moral precepts. This issue is of great importance, not only for legal theorists but for all of us as we prepare for future political problems that face the world today.