Abstract

The essay focuses on a point in Hannah Arendt’s work which – though of great importance whenever the systematic outlines of her thinking should be taken into regard – has not yet attracted much attention: After having faced the challenge of evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil, 1963), in her New York Lectures on Some Questions of Moral Philosophy (ed. by Jerome Kohn in 2003) in 1965 Arendt turned with equal energy towards the notion of moral goodness. Starting from the astonishing example of those very few men and women who refused to surrender to the spirit of public crime in Nazi Germany, she rediscovers the features of a moral self-understanding with constant reference to Plato’s Socrates. In this essay, Arendt’s reflections are taken in earnest as genuine elements of a moral groundwork.