What would it mean to foreground the capacity to judge critically and reflectively as a central feature of modern democratic citizenship? This question, raised poignantly albeit not systematically in the work of Hannah Arendt, is of crucial importance for political theory today. For Arendt, the problem of judgment arises in the wake of the collapse of inherited criteria for judgment or what she called the final break in tradition that marked totalitarianism, the definitive political event of the twentieth century. For contemporary theorists, the problem of how to judge in the absence of inherited concepts or rules remains an important one. But our focus must be different. The problem is not only the collapse of traditional standards as such but also how to take account of the plurality of standards that characterize multiethnic and multiracial societies such as the United States and, increasingly, Western Europe.
