"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been"
About this Quote
Arendt is taking a scalpel to the fantasy that fear governs human behavior. The opening sentence doesn’t merely doubt harsh penalties; it denies the basic premise of deterrence as a moral technology. “No punishment” is deliberately totalizing, a dare to the reader’s most punitive instincts. She’s not being naïve about wrongdoing; she’s suspicious of the state’s confidence that violence, administered cleanly and legally, can regulate a messy world.
The second line is the real provocation: once a crime appears, it becomes culturally thinkable, even repeatable. Arendt’s subtext is that transgression spreads less like a contagious impulse than like an available script. The first act breaks the spell of impossibility; the second act borrows the proof. That’s why she says reappearance is “more likely” than initial emergence: novelty is the hurdle, not conscience. Punishment, then, can’t reverse the fact that a boundary has been publicly crossed and thereby mapped.
Context matters: Arendt wrote in the shadow of regimes that treated punishment as pedagogy and terror as governance. Her work on totalitarianism and the “banality of evil” circles the same insight: ordinary people can be recruited into extraordinary crimes when institutions normalize them. Read that way, the quote isn’t a plea for leniency; it’s an indictment of simplistic cause-and-effect politics. If crime repeats, she implies, look less to sentencing tables and more to conditions that make certain acts plausible, legible, and administratively easy. Punishment may satisfy a public appetite for closure, but it rarely competes with the power of example.
The second line is the real provocation: once a crime appears, it becomes culturally thinkable, even repeatable. Arendt’s subtext is that transgression spreads less like a contagious impulse than like an available script. The first act breaks the spell of impossibility; the second act borrows the proof. That’s why she says reappearance is “more likely” than initial emergence: novelty is the hurdle, not conscience. Punishment, then, can’t reverse the fact that a boundary has been publicly crossed and thereby mapped.
Context matters: Arendt wrote in the shadow of regimes that treated punishment as pedagogy and terror as governance. Her work on totalitarianism and the “banality of evil” circles the same insight: ordinary people can be recruited into extraordinary crimes when institutions normalize them. Read that way, the quote isn’t a plea for leniency; it’s an indictment of simplistic cause-and-effect politics. If crime repeats, she implies, look less to sentencing tables and more to conditions that make certain acts plausible, legible, and administratively easy. Punishment may satisfy a public appetite for closure, but it rarely competes with the power of example.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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