Benhabib, Sheila - Reclaiming Universalism

Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determination and Cosmopolitan Norms
SEYLA BENHABIB

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Delivered at

University of California at Berkeley March 15–19, 2004

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and director of the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. She waseducated at the American College for Girls in Istanbul, Brandeis University, and received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1977. She has taught at Boston University, The New School for Social Research, and Harvard, where she chaired the Program in Social Studies. In addition to her many scholarly articles and edited volumes, she is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study in the Foundationsof Critical Theory (1986); Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Post-Modernism in Contemporary Ethics (1992), which won the 1993 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award; The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996, 2003); The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002); and The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (2004), which wonthe 2004 American Society for Social Philosophy Award.

I. THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COSMOPOLITAN NORMS
1. The Eichmann Trial It is December 12, 1960. Israeli secret agents have captured Adolf Eichmann, and the Israeli government has declared its intention to put Eichmann on trial. Karl Jaspers writes to Hannah Arendt: “The Eichmann trial is unsettling. . .because I am afraid Israel maycome away from it looking bad no matter how objective the conduct of the trial. . . . Its significance is not in its being a legal trial but in its establishing of historical facts and serving as a reminder of those facts for humanity.”1 For the next several months and eventually years an exchange ensues between Hannah Arendt and her teacher and mentor, Karl Jaspers, about the legality orillegality of the Eichmann trial, about institutional jurisdiction, and about the philosophical foundations of international law and in particular of “crimes against humanity.” Arendt replies that she is not as pessimistic as Jaspers is about “the legal basis of the trial” (Correspondence, 414). Israel can argue that Eichmann had been indicted in the first trial in Nuremberg and escaped arrest. Incapturing Eichmann, Israel was capturing an outlaw—hostis humani generis (an enemy of the human race)—who had been condemned for “crimes against humanity.” He should have appeared before the Nuremberg Court, but since there was no successor court to carry out its mission, Arendt thinks that Israeli courts have a plausible basis for assuming jurisdiction.2

1. Hannah Arendt–Karl Jaspers Correspondence:1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, pp. 409–10. All future references to Correspondence in the text are to this edition 2. In the epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, written several years later, Arendt no longer considers the analogy of Eichmann’s crime to “piracy” useful and points out that “[the] pirate’s exception to the territorial principle—which, in theabsence of an international penal code, remains the only valid principle—is made not because he is the enemy of all, and hence can be judged by all, but because his crime is committed in the high seas, and the high seas are no man’s land.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, p. 261. All references in the text to “Arendt 1963” are to this edition.

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The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

According to Hannah Arendt, genocide is the one crime that truly deserves the title “crime against humanity.”3 “Had the court in Jerusalem,” she writes, “understood that there were distinctions between discrimination, expulsion and genocide, it would have become clear that the supreme crime it was confronted with, the physical extermination of the...