Daniel Bell
THE ALPHABET OF JUSTICE
REFLECTIONS ON "Eichmann In Jerusalem"
Hannah Arendt's book is about justice. In fact, as she says,
"the purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else." But this
trial is about other things as well: about agony, cowardice, betrayal,
shame, and, above all perhaps, vengeance. How can one write objectively
about such things? All we can do is to respond and, in the way in which
we respond,
to
identify ourselves, our qualities, and our commitments.
Both the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) and the Stoics held that
Man, unrestrained, is a
behema,
a wild animal-the natural man of
Rousseau and Freud before the appearance of the civil order or civiliza–
tion-and that morality, rooted in conscience (or, in the Christian
version, in guilt or sin), is insufficient to the task of restraint without
the external force of law. Thus justice, in the first, tribal instance, has
an awesome, retributive basis, barbaric as we may now think it to
be.
In the second, more disinterested, conception justice is rooted in the
natural law, which demands of men penalties for the disruption of the
moral order itself.
The reaction of many persons has been: Why raise such distinc–
tions? The crime was so great and Eichmann's complicity, whether as
major instigator or minor cog, was so clear, why not let the trial stand
as a symbolic event? Why raise abstract questions such as whether
Eichmann should have been tried for crimes against humanity, rather
than for crimes against the Jewish people? The objection is a genuine
one. It goes back to the root of one's identity, and one's root conception
of the world.
One can see the world as a human community and man's quest
as
the difficult one of defining some permanently valid universal rules–
either through some conception of natural law or some consensual
international code. Or one can see the world as inevitably hostile and
divided (from the orthodox point of view between Jews and
goyim),
