Judgment, Imagination, and Politics

Ronald Beiner is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Jennifer Nedelsky is professor of political science and women's studies at the University of Toronto.

Beiner and Nedelsky have put togther a fine volume that is a must-read for anyone interested in the problem of judgment. We make judgments every day in law, culture, and politics. And yet, in late modern plural societies it is harder than ever to account for those judgments. Why are they not mere expressions of the institutional power held by judges, critics, or statesmen? Taking Kant and Arendt as their points of departure, the essays in this timely and valuable volume answer that question by exploring the conditions and aspirations of judgment in late modernity.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionPart 2 The Problem of Judgment in Recent Moral and Political PhilosophyChapter 3 The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political SignificanceChapter 4 Aesthetic Problems of Modern PhilosophyChapter 5 Moral JudgmentChapter 6 The Public Use of ReasonPart 7 Autour de Hannah Arendt: Debates in Contemporary Political Theory Concerning the Arendtian Theme of JudgingChapter 8 Rereading Hannah Arendt's Kant LecturesChapter 9 Judgment, Diversity, and Relational AutonomyChapter 10 The Judgment of ArendtChapter 11 Judging Human Action: Arendt's Appropriation of KantChapter 12 Hannah Arendt on Judgment: The Unwritten Doctrine of ReasonChapter 13 Judgment and the Moral Foundations of Politics in Hannah Arendt's ThoughtChapter 14 Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged ThoughtChapter 15 Embodied Diversity and the Challenges to LawChapter 16 When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom: Reflections on Hannah Arendt's Concept of JudgmentChapter 17 Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Alienation, and Critique