In Arendt's Judgment: Freedom, Responsibility, and Citizenship, Jonathan Peter Schwartz offers a provocative and fresh reading of Arendt's published and unpublished work. His goal is to demonstrate that the question of the “true relationship between philosophy and politics was the ultimate task of Arendt's work” (7, 9), with the important result that Arendt saw the faculty of judgment as the bridge that reaches “across the abyss that separated thought and action” (11). Schwartz claims that the advantage of reading Arendt in a way that “places political judgment at the very center of her thought” is to provide a framework for “renewing practical reason in a modern era that has profoundly undermined it” (13), a task which he achieves with elegance.

Schwartz discusses Arendt's conception of philosophy and politics against the background of her theory of modernity to show that Arendt's “proposed authentic political philosophy constituted a positive response to the modern situation as Arendt understood it” (14). Instead of seeing Arendt as nostalgic for a lost tradition, Schwartz's reading adds to those interpretations of her work that emphasize its constructive engagement with modernity and its problems. In his reconstruction, Arendt's conception of judgment emphasizes the needed modern re-creation of the Western political realm, not “through ‘theory’ in some sort of sovereign act of fabrication,” but rather through individual citizens who can think, judge, and act politically “for themselves, without the direction of a sovereign theorist” (185). Schwartz's interpretation contributes to readings of Arendt that emphasize a nonsovereign and intersubjective theory of agency (44, 45). The characterization allows him to argue that Arendt criticizes a narrow modern perspective for which success is the ultimate criterion for judging an action.

In the conclusion to the book, Schwartz predicts a future world characterized by a low-growth regime and marred by the danger of ecological catastrophes, which will require a radical change in the Western existential orientation. Arendt's theory of judgment could inspire this change owing to an understanding of human agency that values meaning and participation more than sovereignty, mastery, and success, as well as a “robust, diverse, committed, and cosmopolitan citizenry” (194). Schwartz leaves the reader wanting to hear more about how the envisaged cosmopolitanism of a free and responsible citizenry would take shape and how it would work in the current world. Even so, his book remains not only an original reading of Arendt's work, but also an ambitious opener of new paths for future thinking and research.

In the first two chapters, Schwartz provides an interpretation of Arendt's theory of action, which relies on the assumption that the “origins and meaning of history are not in world historical processes but in a dynamic conception of human agency” (61) and that to understand politics means to grasp “the primordial experiences of political action that lay behind our political language” (64). Arendt identifies three such primordial experiences in the Western tradition: (i) the Greek “politics of no-rule” (66), where citizens deliberate together in order to get insight into their common world, without accepting the guidance of the philosopher (69); the Roman politics of care and preservation of the world, which, out of the “capacity to politicize law and foreign policy,” established Western civilization and the humanist tradition that is attached to it (75, 79); and, finally, modern revolutionary politics. The result is a view of action as both virtuosity that strives for political immortality and care for the common world, as well as a demanding task for the moderns, that of engaging themselves in successful acts of founding.

Schwartz explains that only those political actions that achieve the criteria of historical judgment qualify for political immortality, because they “care for and preserve our common world” (61). While Schwartz spends some time clarifying the idea of common world (54) and, implicitly, what care for the world would entail, in the end the reader is left with the nagging feeling that not enough has been said on the criteria of historical judgment. This issue would have also required a more sustained discussion of the relationship between morality and politics, which Schwartz provides only very briefly (178). A dialogue with Judith Butler's book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Criticism of Zionism and with Ella Myers's book Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World would have given a clearer sense of the type of civil society and culture that would be favorable to the cultivation of committed and cosmopolitan citizens who can act in the public realm in ways that care for the world.

In the third chapter, Schwartz reconstructs Arendt's account of a thinking that is not tyrannical and separate from common sense (97–103). This type of thinking is meant to function as a corrective to the political pathologies of modernity, which Schwartz discusses in the fourth chapter. He argues here that world alienation—the excessive freeing of moderns from limitations that are intrinsic to their condition and the loss of a common world—led to ideological thinking and totalitarian politics. These two focus on processes, not on individuals, and are led by the hubristic desire to master the world and make it anew. These political pathologies reflect the failure of the moderns to “reestablish a space for authentic freedom,” the expression of a more fundamental inability to engage in authentic political judgment (129).

Chapter 5 shows how Arendt's theory of judgment can act as a corrective to the political pathologies of modernity and as inspiration for the renewal of modern practical reason. Schwartz argues that central to Arendt's view of judgment is a form of validity that is neither “idiosyncratic to the individual” nor “based on the absolute authority of the community” (161), but intersubjective. As a result, in “matters of political judgment, thinking in terms of right or wrong answers is not the appropriate way to consider the question; rather it has to do with who has a more illuminating and perspicuous understanding of the matters we are examining.” The question here is “to try to determine who is more right, who has a clearer, more cultivated sensus communis, who has a deeper, richer feeling of reality” (182). Truth and the standards for judging right from wrong are not the exclusive and sovereign possession of an elite, but “wholly contingent upon the judges involved,” the citizens who are required to participate. However, “those who participate must be true citizens in the Arendtian sense,” who have cultivated their taste for public freedom, are committed to a common world, and are willing to assume responsibility for this common world by judging and acting in ways that care for it and preserve its commonality (186).

The end of the book leaves the reader with a desire for some clarifications. Schwartz argues that both liberalism and totalitarian ideologies are forms of ideological thinking. This is a sweeping statement. A critical engagement of Charles Taylor's analysis of the modern social imaginary from A Secular Age, along lines that are similar to Arendt's take on modernity, would have allowed for a more nuanced discussion of this issue. Part of Schwartz's reconstruction of Arendt's theory of judgment is also a reconsideration of the potential that revolutionary politics has for developing a more participatory modern citizenship. Unfortunately, the conclusions of the book do not connect Arendt's discussion of different modern revolutionary bodies to the theorization of a nonsovereign form of political philosophy to which the participation of the citizens is central. Moreover, more participatory citizens, who are able to truly judge politically, need to “learn once again to be humanists” and cultivated citizens (150). However, Schwartz does not say much on the meaning of humanism or on the limits of Arendt's understanding of humanism.

Schwartz provides in his book a valuable and thought-inspiring reconstruction of Arendt's theory of judgment and of its application to the problems of the modern world. By focusing on Arendt's analysis of how life processes, and the necessity that is associated with them, colonized modern societies and their politics, Schwartz's reading brings Arendt's take on modernity closer not only to Foucault's idea of biopolitics, but also to contemporary attempts to think what a meaningful and good life would entail and thus move beyond the modern over concern with life and its protection. In this respect, Schwartz's book bears a promise that intersects with the work of contemporary thinkers, such as the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. But, of course, this is Arendt for the future.