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.
