© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15691640-12341448 Research in Phenomenology 50 (2020) 216–239 brill.com/rp Research in Phenomenology Towards an Arendtian Conception of Justice Yasemin Sari Department of Philosophy and World Religions, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA yasemin.sari@uni.edu Abstract This article argues that Arendt’s rich account of the political necessarily involves an implicit, but never fully worked out, phenomenological articulation of justice in her work. Arendt’s unique articulation of the role of judgment in political action provides us with the outline of an Arendtian principle of justice that relieves the tension be- tween idealist and realist theories of justice. Building on this role of judgment, I aim to emphasize the phenomenological premise of identifying the conditions for the pos- sibility of the political in empirico-historical events rooted in her ideas of plurality and freedom. By showing that, for Arendt, justice is a phenomenon like power and equality, we can make progress on an implicit account of justice in her work. Taking seriously Arendt’s articulation of freedom-manifesting and principled political action, I will show that a principle of justice guides political action based on political judg- ment that is affectively oriented to the world. Keywords affect – Arendt – freedom – judgment – justice – plurality – principle In a 1953 letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt talks about her disenchantment with Marx in light of her realization that he was not interested in freedom or justice.1 Given the absence of a full-fledged account of justice in her own cor- 1  She states: “I’m preparing my Princeton lectures and a lecture for Harvard. At Princeton I’ll talk about Marx in the tradition of political philosophy. The more I read Marx, the more I see that you were right. He’s not interested either in freedom or in justice. (And he’s a ter- rible pain in the neck in addition.) In spite of that, a good springboard for talking about