‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and Reflective Judgment

Abstract

Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last two decades, a number of critical contributions have been published addressing this essay, highlighting how it casts serious doubts on the correctness of Arendt’s dealing with the racial question and, more generally, on the tenability of central elements of her political thought – e.g., her distinction between the political and the social. However, only occasional – and, as I will try to demonstrate, quite imprecise – analyses of the implications of RLR for an understanding of Arendt’s view of judgment have been produced. The aim of the present article is to reread what both Arendt’s position on judgment and its main contemporary reformulation, advanced by Linda Zerilli, imply for the making of political choices in pluralistic societies. Special attention will be also paid to the relation between the particular and the universal in Arendtian thought. In the first section I will reconstruct the main (factual and argumentative) weaknesses of RLR, while in the second a detailed assessment of the criticisms relating RLR and Arendt’s view of judgment will be provided. Finally, in the last section I will discuss at length Zerilli’s conception of feminist judgment.