  Arendt’s concern with judgment as the faculty of retrospective assessment that allows meaning to be redeemed from the past originated in her attempt to come to terms with the twin political tragedies of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. Faced with the horrors of the extermination camps and what is now termed the Gulag, Arendt strove to understand these phenomena in their own terms, neither deducing them from precedents nor placing them in some overarching scheme of historical necessity. This need to come to terms with the traumatic events of the twentieth century, and to understand them in a manner that does not explain them away but faces them in all their starkness and unprecedentedness, is something to which Arendt returns again and again. Our inherited framework for judgment fails us “as soon as we try to apply it honestly to the central political experiences of our own time” (UP, 379). Even our ordinary common-sense judgment is rendered ineffective, since “we are living in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by abiding by the rules of what once was common sense” (UP, 383).