Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political philosophy. After reporting on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Arendt embarked on a series of reflections about how to make judgments and exercise responsibility without recourse to existing law, especially when existing law is judged as immoral. This book uses Hannah Arendt’s text Eichmann in Jerusalem to examine major themes in legal theory, including the nature of law, legal authority, the duty of citizens, the nexus between morality and law and political action.
1 Introduction: The Eichmann fires
2 The House of Judgment
3 The gray zone: Kapo trials
4 The accused
5 From expulsion to extermination
6 Wannsee: The enabling conference
7 Duties of a law-abiding citizen
8 The deportation chapters
9 Did Eichmann receive a fair trial?
10 Judgment
11 Reading Eichmann today
12 The last Nazi trials and forgiveness
Biography
Peter Burdon is Associate Professor and Reader at the Adelaide Law School, The University of Adelaide, Australia.
Peter Burdon’s Hannah Arendt: Legal Theory and the Eichmann Trial fills a lacuna in legal theory, coming to terms, as it does, with the legal implications of Arendt’s writings and, in particular, of her analysis of the trial of Adolph Eichmann. The beauty, and critical importance, of this book lies in the way that Burdon mixes a close reading of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, within a larger context, both of her own engagement as a political theorist but also in terms of national and international law. Through Burdon’s careful reading, we reencounter Arendt’s judgments about the law and the trial of Eichamann through a screen of larger legal and ethical issues. Reading Arendt in this context clarifies and engages with many of her views (some very controversial) and helps us to understand both why she made these judgments and also what ramifications they have for questions of law and politics.
Professor James Martel, San Francisco State University.Hannah Arendt: Legal Theory and the Eichmann Trial makes a unique contribution to the study of Arendt and law, in way that is as stimulating for its methodological approach as it is for its contribution substantive debate. Students and academics, Arendt and legal scholars alike will find here more than a valuable introduction to one of Arendt’s most (in)famous works. By extrapolating from that work to the many and varied ways in which Arendt engaged with law across her oeuvre this book offers fresh insights both into what Arendt herself had to say about law and what Arendt’s work says to contemporary debates in legal theory and practice.
Christopher McCorkindale, University of Strathclyde
Marco Goldoni, University of Glasgow
