The Preconditions for Judgment: Constitutions and Institutions in the Work of Hannah Arendt

ABSTRACT In the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt mistakenly depends on judgment for the creation of a common world. (Linda Zerilli’s work is the best account of this strain in Arendt’s thought.) Instead, this article argues that Arendt’s accounts of promises in The Human Condition and of constitutions in On Revolution point to the preconditions for all acts of judgment. In other words, the world must be constituted prior to judgment. And that world-creation relies on collective speech acts. Only with that framework in place does the process of judgment, understood as the intersubjective exchanges that involve wooing the consent of the other, become possible.