National interest and personal responsibility in Hannah Arendt's «Eichmann in jerusalem»

This article is devoted to the problem of personal and political responsibility in works of Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist. Her main study on this subject, «Eichmann in Jerusa-lem», is presented as an argument against theory of national interest and its main contributor Carl Schmitt. The main contradiction point between two authors lies in the question: under what circumstances ethical and political theories fail to evaluate personal decisions as good or bad? Nazi functionaries after World War II used to blame country's government for crimes against humanity, claiming to be just doing what is necessary for the survival of a society. According to Arendt, any totalitarian regime and all its public activities have another purpose: to eliminate all traditional social institutes and to turn society into the multitude of atomised individuals. Measure of guilt is therefore defined by measure of participation in these activities, and this unprecedented situation can be solved only by international trial. Under these circumstances person can remain innocent only by avoiding any form of political participation and responsibility. This recipe is unacceptable for Car Schmitt, who has been working on the problems of political deci-sionism and sovereignty since early years of Weimar Republic. He claims that it is the ability to act under the state of emergency, when regular law becomes irrelevant, which defines political sovereign from random groups of common people. Despite his well-known unofficial title of "crown jurist of the Third Reich", in his early works Schmitt appears to support democratic republican government and to show it a possible way through future crises - a way which he sees in dictatorial authority. We can see a deep distinction between two these approaches to similar problematics. Arendt is concentrated mostly on acts and motives of individual person, which she sees as a fulfilment of human free will and a foundation of inevitable responsibility at the same time. Schmitt focuses on military and police practices of decision-making, such as juridical norm of martial law, which he describes as instruments of overcoming state of emergency. But the collective analysis of these two authors allows us to see the implicit dispute between them and to go deeply into both their theories.

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