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Linda M. G. Zerilli: A Democratic Theory of Judgment. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xix, 379.)
To those of us who fear for liberal democracy in view of the onslaught of fake news and the resurgence of right-wing populism, Linda Zerilli gives an Arendt for our time. This Arendt cares more about the question of “what it means to have a world in common” than she does about the problem of relativism (267). She sparks a “Copernican revolution in political theorizing” by establishing that democratic politics orbits around judging rather than willing (190). And by this revolution, she substitutes a grounded freedom premised on sovereignty with a practiced freedom, one that we realize by allowing “plural opinions” to open our minds and senses to new aspects of our common world (141).
In this collection of closely interrelated essays, Zerilli mounts a counterhegemonic struggle against the “rationalist (neo-Kantian) approaches” that “dominate contemporary political thinking” about democratic citizenship, and which cast a long shadow on Arendt's account of judgment (240). By reading Arendt's work in light of ordinary-language philosophy, Zerilli turns Jürgen Habermas's famous charge decisively against him. Rather than lacking “the normative criteria” by which to differentiate between the legitimate and coercive exercise of a collective will, Zerilli shows that Arendt's account of judgment makes a “far more radical” break with the “entire modern philosophy of the will” than “anything” Habermas proposed (187, 189).
Zerilli sets Arendt up to vanquish Hume and Kant by showing how they posed a dilemma from which they could not extricate themselves: How to “claim normativity for our judgments” (77)? How is it that in judging a decision, an event, a demonstration, a regime, I can be understood not merely to express a preference or aversion but to make a claim that I can reasonably expect...