Justice

It’s difficult to approach this book, written in 2018, with the experiences of all the years which followed its publication. I found myself agitated throughout the reading. Many of Levitsky and Ziblatt’s points seem utterly naive and optimistic. There is a section of the book in which they lay out three potential scenarios for the future of the Trump Administration and the country. In one, their darkest, they describe a variety of “extreme” sounding ideas which they ultimately conclude to be unlikely. Each and every one has now occurred. ...

I’m not going to write a long review of Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s trial as I picked it up specifically to explore the elements of justice that are described therein. I also feel this is a difficult book to review; I have no historical expertise on the subject and am unqualified to evaluate anything about it other than, maybe, the prose. And the prose, I like. Arendt’s writing here—despite the topic—is quite a bit more “fun” than her writing in The Human Condition, in that she writes with a lot of irony and a dry humor. ...

See my critique on TBinDC. Notes John Rawls throughout – see Zotero for Theory of Justice notes. p24 Seeking alignment — >Contra Berlin’s argument that pluralism of values means inevitable conflict among them, analysis of real political choices would begin with the project of seeking alignment between the protection of negative and of positive liberties. Only after a project of pursuing alignment had been exhausted would one turn to debating a trade-off between these two categories of liberties. ...

Quick disclaimer to say that I am woefully unqualified to review Arendt. I am not well read philosophically. I picked this up alongside Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling because 1) it kept showing up in other books I read, notably GHAM and The Long Form; and 2) I am interested in ideas around “goodness” – what it is, how to be it, what it means to be it. Arendt speaks relatively little about goodness. ...