Hannah Arendt

The argument Arendt developed was not that Eichmann had been a good man, or even an ordinary man. It was that the kind of evil he had administered did not require the demonic depth earlier moral philosophy had often assumed it would. Eichmann had been driven by careerism, by a desire to be efficient at his job, by an inability to think from any perspective other than the institutional one he had been trained inside. His moral imagination had not failed dramatically. It had simply not been there, replaced by the procedural language of his office.

The phrase the banality of evil, coined in the book’s subtitle, was meant to name this specific phenomenon. Banality, in her usage, did not mean trivial. It meant lacking depth, lacking the substance that would have made resistance possible. Eichmann could administer the deportation of millions because the deportation, to him, was a transportation problem to be solved efficiently. The mass murder at the end of the line was, from his desk in Berlin, an abstraction.

The reception of Eichmann in Jerusalem was unusually hostile, particularly within Jewish intellectual and institutional circles. Within months, figures who had been close to Arendt including Gershom Scholem and Hans Jonas were publicly criticizing her interpretation. The Anti-Defamation League circulated a memo against the book. Jewish newspapers ran editorials accusing Arendt of minimizing the Holocaust, mischaracterizing the perpetrators, and blaming the victims for their own destruction.

The blaming-the-victims accusation came from passages in the book in which Arendt discussed the Judenräte, the Jewish councils that the Nazis had installed to administer the ghettos. Arendt had argued, controversially, that the cooperation of certain Jewish leaders with the deportation process had increased the death toll, that resistance and disorganization would have saved more lives, and that the moral cost of the councils’ compliance deserved serious philosophical attention. The argument, presented in a few paragraphs of the book, became the focus of much of the controversy. Critics read it as an indictment of Holocaust victims. Defenders read it as a serious engagement with the moral complexity of cooperation under impossible conditions. The argument has continued to be debated.

The concept of the banality of evil has become one of the most-used and most-misused ideas in postwar political thought. The phrase is invoked in journalism, in policy debates, in fiction, and in any conversation about how ordinary people participate in extraordinary harms. The usage often departs from what Arendt was arguing. The phrase has come to mean something like everyday evil or routine evil, the idea that bad things are often done by unremarkable people. That reading is not entirely wrong, but it loses the specific philosophical claim Arendt was making about the relationship between thoughtlessness and atrocity.

The empirical research that has accumulated since has been broadly supportive of Arendt’s structural argument. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, which began in New Haven in 1961 the same year as the trial produced laboratory data showing that ordinary American subjects would administer painful electric shocks to strangers when instructed by an authority. Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men documented how ordinary middle-aged Germans in Reserve Police Battalion 101 had been transformed into mass killers by institutional pressures over a few months. The mechanisms Arendt had identified turned out to operate in laboratory and field settings.

Hannah Arendt died in New York in 1975, at sixty-nine, having spent her last decade on a three-part study called The Life of the Mind. The final volume, on judgment, was unfinished at her death. The argument she had been developing that the practice of thinking is itself a moral activity, and that the failure to think is the condition that allows institutional evil to operate was the philosophical extension of what she had seen in the Jerusalem courtroom.