This is a sprawling work, and it is difficult in the space of a short review to encompass and do justice to all the thinkers, arguments, and debates that the book seeks to engage. The center of gravity is clearly Hannah Arendt and her attempt to sketch an account of reflective judgment and its relevance for politics drawn from Kant. Arendt’s idea of judging, developed most fully in the posthumously published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (originally 1982), has generated a very large and stimulating literature over the course of the past 36 years, and Linda Zerilli has been one of the most significant contributors to that literature, even before publishing A Democratic Theory of Judgment. But here, Zerilli’s dialogue with Arendt is mediated through a host of other diverse thinkers: John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas; Leo Strauss (surprisingly); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Peter Winch; Susan Okin and Martha Nussbaum; Ernesto Grassi; and many others. The eclecticism of Zerilli’s sources and interlocutors renders it challenging to make one’s way through the book’s complicated odyssey. One has to marvel at its scope and ambition.
Yet there is a problem or set of problems at its core. This is helpfully stated in the Preface. When participants in political life commit themselves to the business of individual and collective judgment concerning the world that they share politically, one can emphasize either the question of what constitutes a valid normative judgment or the very performance of judgment as constitutive of a shared world, apart from determinations of its validity or lack of validity (geared to normative “adjudication,” as Zerilli puts it). What Zerilli draws from the Arendtian account is the conviction that “judging must involve more than deciding questions of validity; it must be a democratic world-building practice that creates and sustains human freedom” (p. xiii). This is, generally speaking, the approach to judgment that Zerilli aims to elaborate. She leans toward privileging judgment as theorized by Arendt because it offers an understanding of the activity of judging that is “less adjudicative and more creative and reflective” (p. xii; cf. p. 142). However, Zerilli appreciates, more vividly than she did in previous writings on the same topic, that the question of validity continues to demand attention: “[T]hough I still think it is freedom, not validity, that stands at the heart of Arendt’s account, I have come to see that judging cannot wholly evade the question of what counts as real or objective, perhaps as true” (p. xiii; cf. p. 119). Indeed: the question of truth or validity cannot be avoided or sidelined. That tension between freedom and truth helps animate the political philosophy of judgment that Zerilli aspires to unfold in her book.
As is well conveyed by Zerilli, the problem of judgment arises in the uncomfortable gap between authoritative objectivity, on the one side, and mere subjectivity, on the other. If we really possessed a commanding objective foundation for evaluatively privileged norms, our exertions of judgment would be redundant, since the right judgments would simply flow from the authoritative theory. Clearly, many people in the theory world see egalitarian liberalism, whether in its Rawlsian or Habermasian versions, as such a theory. Zerilli is (rightly) skeptical, on account of the tendencies on the part of Rawls, Habermas, and their followers to proceduralize (“neutralize”) the relevant norms. On the other hand, if the deliverances of our power of judgment could not rise above our subjective perspectives in all their normative diversity, who would take them seriously? Hence, we need somehow to base judgment on intersubjectivity, but in such a way that it is possible to secure intersubjective validity. This is the task sketched by Arendt that Zerilli seeks to pursue. As she puts it: “T]his in-between space . . . is where I shall continue to place the democratic world-building practice of judging politically” (p. xiv).
Given the daunting breadth and diversity of Zerilli’s sources, it might be best, in the remainder of this review, to stay focused on her debt to, and appropriation of, the judgment theme in Arendt. The question of truth is a central one, and Zerilli knows that she is walking a bit of a tightrope in trying to take Arendt as her main guide while simultaneously grappling with the anxieties kicked up by what increasingly seems to present itself as a perversely “post-truth” political world. Arendt, in an intriguing and theoretically tangled essay entitled “Truth and Politics,” championed opinion, which is plural and persuasive, and criticized rational truth, which is singular and supposedly coercive or compulsory. This built on Arendt's argument in The Human Condition (1958) that Plato, as well as the philosophical tradition he founded, impugned the whole realm of civic agency, with its defining contingency and plurality, by judging it against an exactingly philosophical standard of “timeless truth.” “Truth and Politics” certainly gave the impression of offering an “account of truth as hostile to plurality and all things democratic” (p. 119), an account that has provoked robust challenges from many theorists (including this reviewer). Again: how will citizens be able to take their own judgments seriously, or intend for those judgments to be taken seriously by others, if opinions are mere opinions and not claims to truth? However, while Zerilli continues to think that “the affirmation of nonsovereign freedom” trumps the question of validity as “the all-important task for political judgment” (p. 119), she now wishes to claim that the Arendtian opposition between pluralistic opinion and singular truth is not as sharp as both she and Arendt’s critics previously assumed.
In order to make this argument, Zerilli appeals to the Arendtian depiction of Socrates as a kind of anti-Plato: open to “the truth in opinion” (pp. 126, 128, 131, 142) and willing to engage fellow citizens in the agora in order to render possible a public (citizenly) rather than solitary (philosophical) disclosure of truths “common to all” (p. 122). One notable problem with this account is fairly obvious, a problem that neither Arendt nor Zerilli ever really addresses. From whence did we get our image of Socrates as a citizen-philosopher pursuing truth via engagement with opinion? Plato! If Plato had direct access to a transcendent realm of timeless truth, elevated beyond the pluralism of opinions held by citizens in the polis, why did he write Socratic dialogues? One could make a similar judgment about the Socratic character of the task of political philosophy as sketched in Book I, chapters 4–5 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Reflecting on this might require us to rethink Arendt’s mythology of a philosophical tradition that is monological rather than dialogical.
Arendtian politics is a politics of exuberant participatory citizenship. Faithful Arendtians like Zerilli will tend to presume that the expansion of civic agency and the lively exchange of opinions will always bring enhanced democracy. All committed democrats will naturally find this an attractive presumption. But is this vision not shadowed by lurking doubts? Contemporary populism should give us pause. Nigel Farage worked hard to disseminate his strong opinions and invested tremendous exertions of civic agency in his project to sever the UK from the European Union. Does that automatically mean that his politics should be welcomed and applauded by a theory of “judging politically”? Can we afford to abstract from the content of the politics? Zerilli wants “a critical practice of judging as rooted in the exchange of . . . perspectives” that are not prevetted by a proceduralist normative theory (p. 269; cf. pp. 132 and 141). But what ensures that the outcome is “critical” rather than reactionary?
This problem also links up with similar difficulties with respect to another central pillar of Zerilli’s effort to appropriate Arendtian theorizing for an ambitious rethinking of contemporary democracy, namely, Arendt’s conception of pluralism: “For Arendt, to belong to a democratic political community is to have a ‘common world,’ not to share a worldview, and this common world exists only where there is a plurality of worldviews. Our sense of what is common . . . can appear only when it is seen from multiple perspectives” (p. 265). But this Arendtian pluralism may be less open-ended than either Arendt or Zerilli wish it to be. Is the common world upheld or undermined, for instance, by a worldview that privileges consumer choices over commitment to shared citizenship? Or that prefers to lower taxes even if it means a diminished public realm? Is it upheld or undermined by a worldview that regards the purposes of secular politics as paltry compared with the imperatives of religious piety? Most dramatically: is it upheld or undermined by the racist worldview of the contemporary Alt Right?
Zerilli clearly believes that Arendt’s politics of judgment is recommended by its superior accommodation of moral and political pluralism, certainly relative to reigning forms of contemporary liberalism that are confident in their grasp of a definitive moral truth. But Arendt’s political philosophy, with its celebration of participatory citizenship, its privileging of immortality over eternity, and its moral universalism, also champions a fairly well-defined worldview (it is hard to imagine that it would count as a political philosophy if it did not)—a worldview that may not be deferred to by some of the plural perspectives that it seeks to encompass. There are surely worldviews that have no interest in contributing to or helping to constitute a common world of the kind imagined by Arendt. Her supposedly open-ended pluralism is, in fact, a pluralism of opinions and perspectives held by those already robustly committed to a shared and jointly constituted public world. This would seem to be an inescapable paradox of pluralism as conceived by Arendt, one that a philosophy built on Arendtian foundations will not easily circumvent.
As this discussion illustrates, it is not so easy to appeal to plurality and pluralistic freedom without a philosophical privileging of a particular conception of what normatively defines the common world. What we encounter here is perhaps the Arendtian version of the metaphysical neutralism rightly criticized by Zerilli in other political philosophers (that is, the presumption that one is not oneself relying upon some philosophical Archimedean point). One has to welcome the fact that appeals to truth loom larger in Zerilli’s current version of her theory and her revised interpretation of Arendt than was the case with her earlier work (namely, Zerilli’s important article, “We Feel Our Freedom”, Political Theory, 33(2), 2005). Yet one still has to wonder whether the new version sufficiently acknowledges that even a theory celebrating the space of judgment as a space of freedom and plurality reposes on a specific claim to philosophical truth and not merely the opinions of citizens transmuted into truths. In other words, however determined one may be to limit truth to “Socratic” maieutics, a “Platonic” commitment to the truth of one’s own political philosophy will inevitably creep in.
