Justice & Law Quote by Hannah Arendt

Arendt is doing her favorite kind of moral judo here: taking the category everyone agrees is worst - the criminal - and then quietly redirecting our disgust toward someone far more socially legible. Crime forces us to stare at "radical evil", the unnerving possibility that people can choose harm plainly, even enthusiastically. It is "perplexing" because it resists the comforting stories liberal societies tell about rational self-interest, progress, and rehabilitation. The criminal is a scandal to our sense of order.

Then Arendt sharpens the blade: the hypocrite is "really rotten to the core". The insult is not prudish; it's political. Hypocrisy isn't just lying. It's the performance of virtue as a tactic, a way of laundering complicity through good manners and approved language. The criminal breaks the rules; the hypocrite keeps them on the surface while hollowing them out from within. That makes hypocrisy uniquely contagious: it teaches everyone else that ideals are costumes, that public morality is merely a social technology for getting ahead.

The context is Arendt's lifelong obsession with how evil becomes normal. After totalitarianism and the "banality of evil", she understood that modern catastrophes rarely depend on comic-book villains. They depend on administrators, respectable citizens, and institutions fluent in moral rhetoric while exempting themselves from moral risk. Hypocrisy is rot because it dissolves the very faculty politics needs: the ability to mean what we say in public, to act without hiding behind the language of decency. In Arendt's world, hypocrisy isn't a private flaw; it's an infrastructure of harm.