How Judging Becomes Political—Hannah Arendt’s Introduction of Judgment into the Political Realm

This paper investigates reflective judgmentReflective judgment as a political competence and lays down its function in enacting pluralityPlurality and affirming political freedomFreedom. Judgment is an important yet complex term in Hannah Arendt’s political thinkingPolitical thinking. It signifies the individually and socially formed ability to reflect on our opinionOpinion concerning what is beautiful or not through integrating other points of view into our considerations. ArendtArendt builds on Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to extrapolate the political validity of this non-rational yet generalizable form of judgment. Following Arendt’s idea that reflective judgmentJudgment is a form of civic interaction and communicationCommunication in political associations, the reader is left wondering how she arrives at the political dimension of this apparently subjective ability.