“The Impact of Reality and the Shock of Experience”
from Part V - Arendt and International Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2026
The epilogue to this book is a brief reflection on the relevance of Arendt’s moral philosophy to the current slide toward autocracy in many countries, including my own. Unlike the other chapters of this book, the epilogue is “time-stamped” to the moment of its writing: the first year of a US administration that openly aims to dismantle liberal institutions and inflate the president’s prerogative powers. It describes a set of events that poses moral problems resembling those that preoccupied Arendt in her “emergency ethics.”
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