The Extraordinariness of Evil
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Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is famous — or, in the eyes of many, infamous — for its use of the phrase “The banality of evil” in describing the logistical author of the Holocaust. In Arendt’s estimation, Adolph Eichmann was uncanny because he was a bland functionary who spoke in clichés and acted without thinking — he was, indeed, according to Arendt, incapable of thought and therefore acting with self-consciously evil motivations. Before he was hanged, Eichmann spouted the grossest pabulum about “how we shall all meet again” in the next world, that “such is the fate of all men.” The sheer insignificant weightlessness of his words led Arendt to write the famous paragraph that concluded her chapter about Eichmann’s execution:
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. (p. 250)
There is much to contest in Arendt’s character sketch of Eichmann, who was probably not as thoughtless a patriotic automaton as she thought, and certainly far more virulently anti-Semitic. She may have wrong about Eichmann, but her conviction that horrible crimes against humanity have been committed by “nobodies” rather than monsters, remains compelling. Yet it is wrong to construe Arendt as taking Eichmann…
