The crisis of judgement: Arendt and the tradition of the social contract

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s critique of classical social contract theory through her analysis of the twentieth-century crisis of personal judgement. Whereas scholarship often attributes the crisis of judgement to the collapse of traditional standards, this study argues, on the contrary, that the reluctance to exercise judgement stems from tradition’s enduring influence – particularly the epistemological and political legacies of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. By closely analysing Arendt’s engagements with these thinkers, I demonstrate how the classical contract tradition systematically subordinates or suppresses individual judgement by framing it as unreliable without external criteria, thereby undermining political agency. The paper concludes by emphasizing that recovering judgement as a central faculty of political life requires critically confronting – and overcoming – the conceptual frameworks inherited from social contract theory.