The question of the value of education and research in the humanities is a perennial topic of academic debate—though these debates are anything but merely “academic,” with departmental budgets and tenure-track lines often at stake in their outcomes. While it is certainly true that few scholars of any stripe would question the fundamental value of possessing some level of humanistic education and formation, the true purpose behind this intuition remains only vaguely understood by most participants in the debate. Few thinkers have done more to bring clarity to these debates than the University of Chicago's Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities, D. N. Rodowick. This is Rodowick's second book devoted to the topic, the previous being Philosophy's Artful Conversation (Harvard University Press, 2015). For Rodowick, humanistic education is essentially a practice for cultivating a faculty of judgment. In An Education in Judgment, he marshals support for his position from a thinker who drew from the humanities in a singular manner.

As a contribution to the particular scholarly literature it targets—that is, the debate surrounding Hannah Arendt's historically controversial theory of judgment—it is probably doing Rodowick no injustice to say that it is of limited value. The literature on the topic is voluminous, having been debated extensively in philosophical and political theory circles since at least the early eighties, but now being explored in fields as diverse as psychology, sociology, legal theory, information technology, education studies, and empirical political science. Notably, Rodowick is yet another instance of what might be thought of as the second wave of scholarship on Arendt's theory of judgment, which—in contrast to the first wave that generally saw it as philosophically flawed and tangential to her broader work—has increasingly come to recognize this theory as not just philosophically compelling but also as far more central to her overall philosophy than had once been presumed. Rodowick's treatment of this literature is cursory at best, limited to brief acknowledgments of University of Chicago colleague Linda Zerilli and to several dated touchstone critiques from scholars such as Ronald Beiner, Richard Bernstein, and Seyla Benhabib. He generally sees his position as closely aligned with Zerilli's magisterial demarcation point in the literature, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2016) (xv), but acknowledges the limited scope of his work and recognizes no real obligation for a broader engagement with the literature as necessary. His approach is instead to limit the scope of the book specifically to how Arendt's writings illuminate his own broader project of defending the concept of humanistic education as a practice of cultivating moral and political judgment.

Rodowick's approach throughout the book is less systematic and critical than dialogical and dialectical. Perhaps modeled on the graduate seminars he has led for many years, Rodowick provides sensitive readings of most of Arendt's important writings on judgment, culture, and the humanities, primarily in a formal but conversational style. He places himself in dialogue both with Arendt and with her many interlocutors, such as Kant, Solon, Rene Char, Plato, Socrates, and numerous others. Topics he explores include Arendt's distinctively philosophical notion of “thinking”; a complex, multichapter exploration of the concepts of judgment and culture and their place in Arendt's thought, and reflections on deeper meanings Arendt seemed to pass over; a climactic engagement with what was likely the overriding question that animated Arendt's mature thought, that is, the problematic tension between philosophy and politics; and a concluding, perhaps rather idealistic, attempt to apply these ideas in defense of the political value of humanistic education in his seminars for the University of Chicago's “studio ‘crit’ sessions” in the Department of Visual Arts.

In considering Rodowick's presentation of Arendt, judgment, and culture, it is doubtless true that there is a side of Arendt that would have been sympathetic to his philosophical project. If there was a singular, succinct statement of what she had in mind in her theory of judgment, it likely came toward the end of her essay “The Crisis in Culture” (in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought [Penguin Books, 1968], 217), a key text for Rodowick. Invoking Cicero's eminently Roman defense of Plato, she writes that “even if all criticism of Plato is right, Plato may still be better company than his critics. . . . We may remember what the Romans . . . thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as the past.” This statement perhaps summarizes Rodowick's philosophy of humanistic education, as well: a humanistic approach to literature and philosophy is not primarily concerning with determining whether our interlocutor is “right” or “wrong,” but rather with cultivating a deeper, broader vision of our common world through that encounter. Still, though Arendt was responsible for this account of judgment, which has increasingly inspired so many current thinkers, she was frankly quite a bit less sanguine about its potential to transform “democratic politics” than her many contemporary followers are, and Rodowick appears to be a prime example. Likely writing during Donald Trump's ham-handed attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, Rodowick writes, “I have been writing this book in the midst of one of the most dangerous and divisive political and constitutional crises that has ever arisen in the history of this country. Likewise, I could never have imagined that this book would emerge in an era where politics has profoundly deformed the public possibilities for discerning between truth and opinion, as well as between historical facts and strategic and dishonorable deception” (xvii–xviii). Arendt, on the other hand, who in other works quite explicitly viewed the modern world as an era of conformity and corruption, and who had traumatic experience with even more extreme cases of these “deformed public possibilities,” would have been less surprised but also more pessimistic that her theory of judgment could change these circumstances. Arendt seemed to understand her theory as a practice that may someday open up new political possibilities, where politics becomes an arena for revealing the common world, rather than concealing it behind deception and ideology, as in our current era. A skeptical reader might wonder if college humanities courses could ever really be an adequate, or even important, response to the political pathologies that he, following Arendt, seems so disturbed by.