The Public, the Private, the Moral: Hannah Arendt and Political Morality

ABSTRACT. Although Hannah Arendt never published a book on political morality, she did in the later years of her life think a great deal about the status of morality in a post-Nietzschean era and the implications of this for politics. Evidence can be found both in her published works and in some of her unpublished lecture notes. Arendt struggled toward, though never quite reached, an understanding in which politics is moderated by nonabsolutist moral principles and in which the entire range of human relationships is united by friendship and respect for others, providing both public and private life with a moral basis. In the wake of writing Eichmann in Jerusalem and facing the storm of controversy that followed its publication, Hannah Arendt turned her attention to questions of morality and politics. Her biographer, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, reports that Arendt acquiesced in the suggestion of a correspondent that the book on Eichmann had been a &dquo;groundwork&dquo; for a &dquo;political morals.&dquo; While Arendt never published a treatise on political morality-and indeed, I believe, never resolved to her own satisfaction th