Hannah Arendt Public Opinion

Victoria Kussman

Professor Daniel Howell

FIRST UG-429—001

30 September 2017

Politically Ineffective: Hannah Arendt’s Opinion of the Public Sphere in Eichmann in Jerusalem, through the Lens of Jürgen Habermas’s The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article

According to Jürgen Habermas’s The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article, the public sphere is a metaphorical space in which a large body of people can freely exchange ideas. Its purpose is to “[mediate] between society and state,” with many of the opinions the public expresses—through media such as newspapers and television—taken into account and acted upon by the state. In Habermas’s view, the public sphere administers the state by channeling the force of reason, or operationalizing rationality:

Arendt writes that the German translations at the trial are “sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible.” One could, of course, blame “the old prejudice against German Jews” for this atrocity, but Arendt argues that the fault lies with “the even older and still very powerful ‘Vitamin P,’ as the Israelis call protection in government circles and the bureaucracy” (Arendt 3). In order to understand how these remarks of Arendt’s demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the public sphere, one must again consider Habermas’s The Public Sphere. In Habermas’s view, the public sphere can be split into two sections, the literary public sphere and the political public sphere. In the literary public sphere, “public discussion deals with objects connected to the activity of the state.” In the political public sphere, policymakers and public officials create, finalize, and exercise laws, laws that are based on contributions made by the public in the literary public sphere. A court of law is a key component of the domain of the political public sphere (Habermas 49-50). In the case of Eichmann’s trial, private interests have interfered with the language of the law, and thus with the functioning of the political public sphere. More specifically, “the exercise of political control” is, in this instance, no longer “effectively [subordinate] to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public” (Habermas 49). Translation jobs intentionally have been assigned to individuals who are unable to perform them well, resulting in a distortion of the statements of the prosecution; hence, Eichmann and his counsel, who are members of the public, have been made unaware of the exact information presented in the