Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon portrays the last days of a revolutionary hero, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, who has become disillusioned with the revolutionary regime and is being put on trial by it. Darkness at Noon is often characterized as Koestler's attempt to explain why – beyond reasons of torture and threat – so many of the Bolsheviks, who were put on trial by Stalin in the purges of the second half of the 1930s, falsely confessed to counterrevolutionary crimes. In his fallen hero, Koestler presents the kind of reasoning he believes motivated the revolutionaries both to commit atrocities in the name of the revolution, and later to confess to crimes that they did not commit.

A turn to Darkness at Noon allows me to address three important issues that deserve to be highlighted given the claims I have made over the course of this study. First, I consider more carefully the difficulty of any attempt to loosen the hold of morality and calculable responsibility. Striving to escape the thrall of morality is no easy task, as I have emphasized again and again. I read Koestler's novel as a depiction of a failed attempt by Rubashov to leave the thrall of morality: Rubashov leaves the substance but not the form (calculable responsibility) of morality behind. Second, I explore the risks that accompany any attempt to leave the thrall of morality. Rubashov discards the substantive constraints of received morality while retaining the evasions of calculable responsibility, and this combination has grim consequences. His mis-turn supports my efforts to distinguish a political ethos that is wary of the totalizing claim of morality and calculable responsibility and that seeks release from the thrall of morality from an ethos that seeks to leave morality behind altogether.

The third issue I raise is a danger that may accompany attentiveness to the sway of calculable responsibility in politics. Our diagnoses of the sway of calculable responsibility in the political commitments of others can provoke reductive readings of those commitments. We risk making our political “others” one-dimensional, straw-man exemplars of calculable responsibility, where history, lived experience, political struggle, the operations of power, and psychological nuance play limited or secondary roles in their political stances.