I traveled this weekend to see the opening of a new play about Hannah Arendt at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library. The play is set in Berlin in 1933, during the eight days that Hannah Arendt was arrested and interrogated because of her work for the German Zionist organization and her friend Kurt Blumenfeld. I had also seen the play during its four-month run in NYC earlier this year. It is fantastic, and even then it seemed it could not be more relevant. And yet, in this new iteration, eight months into the Trump administration, the play feels ripped from the front pages.
Arendt was arrested in the Prussian State Library for reading and disseminating examples of German antisemitism. In the interrogation, she is asked if anyone in her family is German. She and her parents were born in Germany; her husband’s family has been in Germany for over 200 years. But according to the new laws, none of them are any longer considered German. They are Jews.
The laws, which should be stable, like fences that mark off what is permitted and what is forbidden, are moving. One day you are a citizen; the next you are an enemy alien. One day Jews can be professors; the next, they are banned from teaching. Jewish shops are shut down. Her passport is taken away, and she is suddenly a stateless person.
Arendt describes her arrest in the interview she gave to Günter Gauss. “I was very lucky,” she tells Gauss. The official who arrested her, she continues, “was a charming fellow! He’d been promoted from the criminal police to a political division. He had no idea what to do. What was he supposed to do? He kept saying to me, ‘Ordinarily I have someone there in front of me, and I just check the file, and I know what’s going on. But what shall I do with you?’”
In the play, the “charming” police officer expresses his frustration with his new job in the political police. In his old job, in the criminal police, he was applying laws to violent and lawless people. If the person was guilty, he prosecuted them. But now he was being asked to interrogate people with doctorates who were reading books in libraries, people who seemed not very much like criminals to him. “What I liked best about that other job is that it was easy to avoid mistakes. But now I worry if I make an error…”
This confession leads to the philosophical heart of the play. Arendt comforts her interrogator; she seeks to understand him. “It’s a lot of responsibility for you,” she says. “The responsibility of judgment.”
Arendt died with the title page for her never-written book on “Judgment” in her typewriter. Judgment is, she argued, the core political faculty. While laws are important, even essential, there are no rules for the application of rules. As judges, civil servants, bureaucrats, policemen, and others, we need to judge without clear rules. And this judgment requires imagination.
In the third of her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt writes that “‘Publicity’ is one of the key concepts of Kant’s political thinking.” Nine weeks later, in the twelfth and penultimate lecture, Arendt argues that “the most important condition for all judgments [is] the condition of impartiality.” Publicity and impartiality are cornerstones of Arendtian judgment and political thinking.
The key to impartiality in judgment is that instead of looking at the world with one’s physical eyes, the impartial observer sees and listens with the mind. By means of the imagination, the impartial spectator makes present the plural opinions of people from multiple perspectives so that they can think critically about their own opinions from an enlarged point of view. To judge impartially, one closes one’s eyes so that they are “not a directly affected, spectator of visible things.”
To judge without rules, I must imagine myself in conversation with as many different people from as many perspectives as possible. I must challenge my own perspective with the imagined views of others. As a police officer, I must consider the views of my victims, also the citizens and other victims of crimes, even children, criminals, and others. From that plurality of perspectives, judgment means finding the view that would appeal to everyone, the truly “public” view with which everyone might agree.
For Arendt, the demand for impartiality is woven together with the requirement for public thinking. The factor of publicity is “necessary for critical thinking.” It is in public thinking where one critically engages not only the doctrines and concepts one receives from others, but also the prejudices and traditions one inherits. One can’t learn this application of critical thinking “without publicity, without the testing that arises from contact with other people’s thinking.”
Impartiality, Arendt insists, is the public thinking that “is obtained by taking the viewpoints of others into account.” Building on the work of Immanuel Kant, she writes that when one encounters opposition, he should not seek merely to refute them. Instead, as Kant writes, by “thinking them over I always weave them into my judgments, and afford them the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs.” This public nature of critical thinking is called impartiality. Kant always hopes that by judging “impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous insight may be obtainable.”
The danger of bureaucratic rule is that as laws recede, bureaucrats can exercise discretion in ways that make a mockery of a limited government based upon consent. Bureaucracy is dangerous not simply because it allows discretion, but because it disguises judgment as rule-following. Officials tell themselves they are only executing policy, when in fact they are making choices that shape lives.
We see this danger today. The arbitrariness of law in Arendt’s Berlin echoes in the arbitrariness of our own immigration system, where the fate of families depends on the snap judgment of an officer. One agent may decide to overlook a minor error on a visa application; another, bound by zeal or fear, consigns a tourist or student to the Kafkaesque hell of detention. One ICE officer may choose to seize a mother at her child’s hearing, while another may exercise discretion and target those who have actually committed crimes. In these moments, the law recedes and judgment emerges.
We see this too in the realm of prosecutorial discretion. When state attorneys general decide whether to pursue Donald Trump for fraud, or when federal prosecutors weigh charges against John Bolton for disclosing classified information, they are not simply applying rules. They are judging — asking whether prosecution serves the public good, whether the law can be bent toward accountability or wielded as a political weapon. In each case, freedom depends not on the black letter of the law but on the impartiality and imagination with which officials exercise judgment.
What matters is whether judgment is exercised with imagination and impartiality. To judge is not simply to apply rules; it is to see the world from the standpoint of others, to make the perspectives of strangers present to one’s mind, and to act in ways that preserve our shared humanity. Arendt knew that freedom survives only so long as judgment is public, impartial, and imaginative — only so long as we resist the temptation to treat human beings as files in a folder.
If you missed last week’s essay on Truth and the Necessity of Lying, it is here. Also, Leon Botstein has an excellent essay on autocracy in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He writes:
“This all fairly describes what President Trump has wrought, in his second term, upon American culture and politics. In the autocracy that is taking shape from the executive branch in 2025, there is no perceptible ideological logic. There are whiffs of nativism, manifest destiny, and isolationism borrowed from pre-1945 American history. But greed, an addictive desire for fame, and a wide enthusiasm for the theatrical capacity to dominate the public arena with nostalgic myths — a talent Donald Trump undeniably possesses — are at the center of Trumpism. Fame and wealth are Trump’s only currencies, aside from a perverse pleasure in humiliating individuals and celebrating cruelty, primarily in the acts of detention and deportation, and threats of legal prosecution without just cause. There is no idealism except some extreme version of Ayn Rand’s glorification of individualism, selfishness, and self-interest. Whatever Trump may stand for, it is a far cry from the traditional ideals of American democracy and a pluralist society — a “melting pot” of sorts — based in part on a long history of immigration from many different continents and cultures.”
