Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s Responsibility and Judgment is a posthumous collection of essays, lectures, and addresses assembled around questions that occupied her throughout her life: How do we judge right and wrong? What responsibility does an individual bear for actions committed within a political system? And what happens when the moral standards of an entire society collapse?

These questions inevitably return Arendt to Nazi Germany. In “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” she rejects the comforting argument that individuals living under dictatorship can surrender responsibility to the system. Hitler did not personally commit every Nazi crime. Thousands of ordinary people made the machinery work. Arendt is particularly interested in those who refused to participate—not necessarily because they possessed a superior moral system, but because they could not live with themselves if they became accomplices. This essay seems disturbingly current. “I was only following orders” is an extreme version of a much more common human temptation: the willingness to surrender personal judgment to a leader, party, institution, or prevailing opinion.

“The Deputy: Guilt by Silence?” was especially striking because Arendt was writing in 1964 about Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play accusing Pope Pius XII of failing to speak adequately against the Holocaust. When Arendt wrote, much of the evidence remained inaccessible. The Vatican finally opened the archives of Pius XII’s pontificate to researchers in 2020. Subsequent discoveries have made the questions raised by Hochhuth and Arendt even harder to dismiss, revealing how much the Vatican knew about Nazi mass murder while Pius maintained his public caution. The complete historical judgment remains contested, but Arendt’s insistence that silence itself can become a moral act—or failure to act—now seems remarkably prescient. I intend to read The Deputy next.

The longest and most unusual piece in the collection, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” finds Arendt addressing morality more directly than she usually did. She was suspicious of moral rules treated simply as inherited commandments. The experience of Nazi Germany had demonstrated how rapidly supposedly respectable moral standards could be exchanged for monstrous ones. She therefore turns toward Socrates and the relationship we have with ourselves. The essential question becomes not merely what society permits but whether I can continue living with myself after doing something I know to be wrong. Judgment requires thinking, and thinking cannot simply be delegated.

But the essay that affected me most was the last, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address.” Arendt delivered it in Boston in May 1975 as the United States approached its two-hundredth birthday. It became the last work she published during her lifetime. She died that December, at sixty-nine, and therefore never saw the Bicentennial she was contemplating. 

There was little triumphalism in her assessment of America at two hundred. The country of 1975 seemed to be coming apart. Saigon had fallen only weeks earlier, completing what Arendt regarded as a humiliating American defeat in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had resigned because of Watergate. Inflation was damaging ordinary life. Cities were deteriorating. Terrorism and political violence seemed increasingly part of the modern world. Most seriously for Arendt, political deception had become institutionalized. The lies surrounding Vietnam and Watergate were not isolated falsehoods but symptoms of a political culture increasingly willing to substitute manufactured images for reality. 

Reading “Home to Roost” fifty years later is unsettling because so much sounds familiar. Once again Americans live amid political division, distrust of institutions, inflationary pressures, international disorder, war, terrorism, and an extraordinary capacity for political leaders and their followers to construct competing versions of reality.

Yet history also supplies a caution against despair.

Arendt did not live to see the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976. Nor could she have known that within fifteen years the Berlin Wall would fall, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe would collapse, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself would disappear with remarkably little violence compared with what might have accompanied the dissolution of a nuclear superpower. The United States that looked so exhausted and disoriented in 1975 survived its crisis and participated in one of the great peaceful political transformations of modern history.

That does not invalidate Arendt’s warning. It makes it more valuable.

Responsibility and Judgment repeatedly argues against historical inevitability. Political systems do not make our moral decisions for us. Institutions do not relieve individuals of responsibility. A terrible present does not guarantee a terrible future, any more than a prosperous present guarantees continued success. Human beings judge, choose, act, and sometimes refuse to act.

That is why this collection feels so contemporary. Arendt does not give us a moral handbook. She gives us something more demanding: the obligation to think for ourselves and then accept responsibility for what we do.

“Home to Roost” is therefore an appropriate final essay. Arendt spent much of her life examining what happens when people abandon judgment and surrender themselves to systems, ideologies, and convenient lies. In 1975 she turned that same uncompromising gaze upon the country that had given her refuge and citizenship. She found America in serious trouble but did not declare its experiment over.

We know something she could not know.

The Republic survived 1975.

That knowledge should give us hope—but not complacency. Arendt’s entire argument insists upon the difference. Survival is not guaranteed by history. It depends upon people who remain willing to distinguish truth from lies, judge right from wrong, and take personal responsibility when doing so becomes difficult.

A Tale of Two Lovers: A Renaissance Humanist Before He Became Pope

 

A Tale of Two Lovers by Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini is an unusual tale both for its content and because the author would later become Pope Pius II. Written in 1444 while Piccolomini was a diplomat and Renaissance humanist, the novella became one of the most popular love stories of the fifteenth century. After his election as pope in 1458, however, he distanced himself from the work.

The story belongs to the long tradition of medieval and Renaissance courtly romance that stretches from Chrétien de Troyes to the literature eventually satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. Yet Piccolomini's lovers are more human than the idealized knights and ladies of earlier romances. They are driven not simply by chivalric devotion but by genuine physical desire.

What surprised me most was the novella's frank celebration of physical love. The lovers meet only twice, yet on both occasions they delight in one another passionately and immediately long for another meeting. Piccolomini presents their intimacy not as temptation but as an essential expression of their love. For a work written in the middle of the fifteenth century, the openness with which he portrays mutual physical affection feels remarkably modern. The story is, for much of its length, unabashedly in love with physical love itself.

In the end, however, the novella returns to convention. The lovers cannot escape the moral and social order surrounding them. The heroine dies in despair, while the knight ultimately marries a worthy bride, restoring the expected balance of virtue and duty. The conclusion is obligatory. The author recognized that his celebration of passion required a moral resolution acceptable to his audience.

A Tale of Two Lovers is not a great work of Renaissance literature, but it is a fascinating one. It stands between medieval romance and Renaissance humanism, revealing a writer more interested in the psychology of love than in the conventions of chivalry. Read today, it is made even more intriguing by the knowledge that its worldly, perceptive author would later become the head of the Roman Catholic Church. That remarkable transformation gives the novella an historical irony almost as memorable as the story itself.

Cambridge American Military Cemetery: Remembering the Airmen Who Never Came Home

Last month I visited the Cambridge American Cemetery in the quiet English village of Coton, just west of Cambridge. Maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery is the resting place of 3,811 American servicemen and women who died during World War II. The Wall of the Missing bears the names of another 5,127 whose remains were never recovered or identified.

Walking among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David, I was struck by how many of those buried there were young airmen. The cemetery lies only a few miles from the airfields that housed the Eighth Air Force, whose heavy bombers flew daily missions over Germany and German-occupied Europe. Although the cemetery includes soldiers, sailors, and a small number of nurses, its character is unmistakably tied to the strategic air campaign.

The Eighth Air Force paid a terrible price for daylight precision bombing. A B-17 or B-24 carried a crew of ten men. On many missions, bombers returned to England riddled with flak and machine-gun fire, their crews nursing dead and wounded comrades. Others never returned at all, disappearing into the North Sea or crashing deep inside enemy territory. Walking through the cemetery, it was impossible not to imagine the stories behind the thousands of identical white markers—pilots, navigators, bombardiers, radio operators, engineers, and gunners who climbed into their aircraft knowing that each mission might be their last.

The cemetery also contains the graves of Medal of Honor recipients and the remains of airmen whose sacrifice helped establish Allied air superiority before the Normandy invasion. Their efforts crippled German aircraft production, transportation networks, oil supplies, and industry, contributing significantly to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

The Cambridge American Cemetery is a place of extraordinary peace. Birds sing, the lawns are immaculate, and the surrounding English countryside seems untouched by war. Yet beneath that tranquility lies the memory of one of history's most costly air campaigns. It is a fitting memorial to the thousands of Americans who crossed an ocean to defend freedom and never made the journey home.

The Battle of Salamis: The Victory That Saved Greece

 

Barry Strauss’s The Battle of Salamis is a well-written, readable account of one of the decisive battles of the ancient world. Drawing on Herodotus and other ancient sources while incorporating archaeological evidence and modern scholarship, Strauss reconstructs the naval battle of 480 B.C. with enough detail to make the confused and dangerous fighting vivid.

I was impressed by Strauss’s portrayal of the divisions within the leadership of both sides. We tend to look backward at famous victories and assume that the winning strategy must have been obvious. At Salamis, almost nothing was obvious. The Greek coalition was fragile, its commanders disagreed about where and even whether to fight, and individual city-states had different interests. The enormous Persian force under Xerxes suffered from its own divisions, conflicting advice, and difficulties of command.

At the center of Strauss’s account is Themistocles. Strauss gives him much of the credit for the Greek victory, and persuasively so. Themistocles understood that Athens could not defeat Persia on land and had spent years building the Athenian fleet. At Salamis he recognized that the narrow waters could neutralize the Persians’ numerical advantage. Perhaps most importantly, he possessed the political cunning necessary to hold the divided Greeks together and maneuver both allies and enemies into fighting the battle where he wanted it fought.

The result was a devastating Persian defeat. Salamis did not immediately end the Persian invasion, but it destroyed Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Greece by overwhelming force and helped preserve the independence of Athens and the other resisting Greek states.

Strauss is particularly good at reminding us that history is made amid uncertainty. The participants at Salamis did not know they were fighting one of history’s most consequential battles. They were frightened men making difficult decisions while their leaders argued about what to do next.

The Battle of Salamis succeeds as both military history and narrative history. It explains ships, tactics, geography, politics, and personalities without losing sight of the human drama. Above all, it restores Themistocles to the center of the story: a brilliant, difficult, sometimes manipulative leader whose preparation and judgment helped make an improbable Greek victory possible.

We: The Forgotten Beginning of the Dystopian Novel

 

I finally read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We at the urging of a friend, and I am glad I did.  As I was reading, I knew I had found the source that of the stream of dystopian novels I have loved. Written in 1920–21 during the earliest years of the emerging Soviet state, the novel was considered too dangerous to publish in Russia. It first appeared in English translation abroad in 1924 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, just before the Soviet system itself collapsed. That history alone makes We sadly typical of Soviet repression. It is one of the earliest warnings that a revolution promising perfect equality could end in brutal tyranny.

Reading We today, however, requires adjusting one's expectations. If I had read it before reading George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I might have stopped reading. Instead, I often found it strange, dreamlike, and structurally uneven. The plot is weaker than the novels it inspired, and at times the symbolism overwhelms the story. George Orwell reached much the same conclusion in his 1946 review, praising the book's originality while acknowledging that it was not entirely successful as a novel.

Yet dismissing We because of its shortcomings would be a mistake. Its historical importance and flashes of brilliance more than justify reading it.

The novel follows D-503, the chief engineer of the spaceship Integral, who lives in the mathematically ordered One State. Citizens have numbers instead of names. Glass buildings eliminate privacy. Daily life is governed by precise schedules. Individual freedom has been sacrificed for collective happiness. D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the state, convinced that reason has solved every human problem. His orderly existence begins to unravel after he meets the mysterious I-330, whose unpredictability introduces him to imagination, passion, and rebellion. 

[Aside on names: In the novel men are consonants, women are vowels. Their apartment number and name are the same. In translation, this caused a small difficulty because the first-person narrator is "I" in English. His lover is also "I" short for I-330 and confusing to an English reader.  In Russian the narrator uses Я to refer to himself.  His lover is И-330 or И for short.  The work of translation is endlessly complex.]

The central conflict is not merely political but philosophical. Can human beings ever be completely happy if they are not free? Can reason eliminate the irrational parts of human nature without destroying humanity itself?

One of the novel's finest moments comes during D-503's conversation with I-330 about revolution. D-503 assumes that history can eventually reach perfection, a final state beyond which no further change is necessary. I-330 calmly dismantles this assumption. Revolution, she argues, is never finished because there can never be a final number. Just as there is no largest number, there can be no final revolution. Every system claiming perfection eventually becomes another system needing to be overthrown. It is a remarkable passage because it transcends its Soviet setting and becomes a meditation on every ideology that promises permanent political perfection.

The dialogue:

D-503:  Do you realize what you are suggesting is revolution?

I-330: Of course it's revolution. Why not?

D: Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.

I: My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, what is the last number?

D: What do you mean the last number?

I: Well, then, the biggest number?

D: But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.

I: Then why do you talk about the last revolution?

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Reading We, it quickly becomes apparent how deeply it influenced later dystopian fiction. Orwell's debt is unmistakable. The surveillance state, suppression of individuality, manipulation of language, and psychological control all anticipate 1984. Huxley borrowed different elements. The sacrifice of individuality for social stability, the management of desire, and the preference for engineered happiness over freedom all echo through Brave New World. 

Margaret Atwood, who wrote the introduction to my edition translated by Bela Shayevich, rightly places We among the foundational works of modern science fiction. Without Zamyatin, it is difficult to imagine the dystopian literature that followed throughout the twentieth century.

Even the newest entries in the genre continue to explore questions Zamyatin first raised. Vince Gilligan's Pluribus imagines a world transformed by an alien phenomenon that leaves almost everyone peaceful, cooperative, and genuinely happy—but at the cost of individual identity and independent will. Unlike Orwell's nightmare of oppression, or Huxley's world of engineered pleasure, Pluribus asks whether humanity might willingly surrender its individuality for universal harmony. The question is strikingly similar to the one at the heart of We: If freedom disappears but conflict, hatred, and war disappear with it, have we created paradise—or simply another prison? 

I kept reading not because of the plot itself but the atmosphere of uncertainty. Throughout the novel I remained genuinely unsure who would betray whom. Loyalties constantly shift. D-503 cannot even trust his own thoughts as his awakening consciousness places him increasingly at odds with the One State. That suspense carried me through passages that otherwise felt obscure or overly symbolic.
In the end, We is probably more important than it is enjoyable. Its influence far exceeds its literary polish. Orwell and Huxley would write more disciplined novels with stronger narratives, Atwood would bring dystopian fiction into the modern era through the experiences of women, and Gilligan has carried many of the same philosophical questions into the twenty-first century. Yet all of them owe a debt to Zamyatin's astonishing act of imagination.

For readers who have already experienced 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and now Pluribus, We is not simply another dystopian novel. It is the spring from which much of modern dystopian fiction flows. Despite its uneven plot and occasional obscurity, it deserves to be read for its originality, its courage, and the remarkable prescience of its warning. Reading it more than a century after it was written, and decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union that once suppressed it, I admire how clearly Zamyatin saw the dangers that lay ahead.

David Hockney at the Serpentine: Peace in a Place Built for War

 

On a recent visit to London I discovered that the setting of an exhibition can become part of the experience. That was certainly true of David Hockney's exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Much of the exhibition is devoted to the landscapes Hockney painted during his years in Normandy, images filled with quiet country roads, blossoming trees, changing seasons, and the gentle rhythms of rural life. Yet these peaceful scenes are displayed inside a former World War II ammunition bunker.

The irony is striking. Visitors descend into a structure built to support war and find themselves surrounded by paintings celebrating peace. The contrast is made even richer by Hockney's choice of subject. Normandy is remembered throughout the world for the D-Day landings and the fierce battles that followed in the summer of 1944. Yet Hockney largely ignores that history. His Normandy is a place of orchards, hedgerows, sunlight, and renewal. The same countryside that once echoed with artillery now becomes a celebration of color and life.

Five years ago I visited Hockney's exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where his landscapes from Normandy also dominated the galleries. Seeing this newer exhibition reminded me how deeply the French countryside has become part of his artistic imagination. Rather than chasing novelty late in life, Hockney has continued to explore familiar landscapes with undiminished curiosity, finding endless variation in changing light, weather, and the cycle of the seasons.

What continues to distinguish Hockney's work is his extraordinary delight in seeing. His paintings are less concerned with photographic realism than with communicating the experience of looking closely. Trees seem almost to pulse with energy, colors become more vivid than nature itself, and ordinary country lanes invite the viewer to slow down and pay attention. His landscapes radiate optimism without becoming sentimental.

The exhibition also demonstrates Hockney's willingness to embrace new technologies while remaining faithful to traditional artistic concerns. Whether working with oil paint, acrylic, or digital media, he is ultimately pursuing the same question: how can an artist represent the experience of seeing the world?

Leaving the gallery, I found myself reflecting once again on the remarkable irony of the exhibition. A wartime bunker had become a sanctuary for paintings celebrating peace, while landscapes forever associated with one of history's greatest battles had become images of serenity and renewal. It was a fitting reminder that places marked by conflict can, with time, become places where beauty once again flourishes.

War and Power: Logistics, Industry, and the Reality Behind Victory

Phillips Payson O'Brien's War and Power is one of the most thought-provoking books on military history I have read in recent years. It complements Graham Allison's Destined for War in an unexpected way. Allison asks why great powers find themselves on a path toward conflict. O'Brien asks a different question: once war begins, what actually determines who wins?

His answer challenges many of our assumptions. O'Brien argues that we have been captivated by the myth of the decisive battle. History remembers names such as El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway, and the Somme because they are dramatic moments with enormous casualties and unforgettable stories. Yet he contends that these battles were often symptoms rather than causes of victory. The real decisions had already been made elsewhere—in factories, shipyards, railroads, ports, oil fields, and supply depots.

The book repeatedly demonstrates that armies do not lose because they suddenly fail on the battlefield. They lose because they can no longer replace men, tanks, aircraft, ammunition, fuel, and food. By the time many famous battles occurred, one side had already exhausted its ability to sustain the war. The battlefield merely revealed a defeat that logistics and industrial production had already made inevitable.

O'Brien applies this argument particularly well to the world wars. His discussion of the First World War is especially illuminating. The conflict is often remembered as a succession of horrific battles with staggering casualties but little territorial gain. O'Brien shifts the focus away from individual offensives to the broader industrial struggle. By 1918, the Allies had achieved overwhelming superiority in the production of artillery, aircraft, tanks, trucks, ships, and munitions. Germany's armies continued fighting bravely, but the nation itself was running out of the means to wage war. Retreat at the front and revolution at home were the consequences of an economic defeat that had been developing for years.

His treatment of the Second World War follows the same pattern. El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Kursk remain immensely important, but O'Brien argues that they should be understood within larger campaigns in which logistics, industrial capacity, and strategic resources had already shifted the balance. Empty fuel depots, broken transportation networks, and factories unable to replace losses mattered as much as battlefield tactics.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its willingness to challenge familiar narratives without diminishing the courage of the soldiers who fought. O'Brien never suggests that battles were unimportant or that individual acts of leadership and bravery did not matter. Rather, he places them within the larger systems that made victory or defeat possible. Soldiers fight battles; nations fight wars.

War and Power is a superb work of military history because it changes the questions we ask. Instead of focusing exclusively on generals and battlefields, O'Brien reminds us to look at the factories, railroads, merchant fleets, oil supplies, and industrial workers who sustained the armies. His arguments are persuasive, clearly written, and supported by an impressive command of historical evidence.

After finishing this book, I found myself looking back at both world wars with a different perspective. We remember the great battles because they are dramatic. O'Brien reminds us that wars are often decided long before the decisive battle begins. It is a compelling reinterpretation, and one that has encouraged me to read more of his work.