Reflective Judgment and Hannah Arendt’s Exercises in Political Thinking

In this chapter, I propose an encompassing reading of Arendt’s oeuvre through the lens of her concept of judgment, and specifically her claim that political thinking must be acquired and practiced in form of exercises. Although she describes her concept of such exercises only in the introduction to Between Past and Future, its relevance cannot be grasped without the theoretical background of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. From this perspective, all Arendt’s writings can be read as exercises in political thinking, decisively communicating her ideas on how to think much more than what to think.