This chapter recalls not only what Arendt says about judgment, but also of how she herself goes about judgment by revisiting her judgment of Adolf Eichmann and his trial. By calling attention to the theatrical quality of the Israeli House of Justice and the trial staged there, Arendt subtly underlines a claim she makes at the beginning of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a claim that is not often considered by critics but one that introduces an argument for which Arendt's account of (...) the trial continues to receive much criticism. The claim is that a trial resembles a play. The argument is that the trial in Jerusalem was a failure. (shrink)

This book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. It suggests that condemning the state's decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death (...) penalty or – to take another exemplary example of the killing state – demanding that the state engage only in just wars, pointing out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions may do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence. (shrink)