Freedom and Responsibility. Notes on the controversy between Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin about the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin were two contemporary Jewish intellectuals who confronted the totalitarian experience philosophically and politically. The positions that both took on the performance of Zionism during and after the war and the deep criticisms they directed towards Jewish assimilation, show the existence of a series of shared concerns developed throughout the decade of the 40s and that, in a way, can be read as the prelude to the deep divergences around the concept of Freedom analyzed in the late 50s and early 60s. Finally, the obvious -though not open- dialogue between the two thinkers is accentuated by the deep controversy caused by the publication of Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. In this framework the objective of our work is to reconstruct the controversy that was developed between the two intellectuals around the prosecution of Eichmann and the weight that there acquires the concept of responsibility in light of the notions of freedom that both thinkers elaborated.