Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy.
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The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971: I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse.
Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he doing wrong’.Īrendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. This article was originally published at Aeon on April 23, 2018, and has been republished under Creative Commons.Ĭan one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.Īrendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’.
Demystified Videos In Demystified, Britannica has all the answers to your burning questions.Britannica Classics Check out these retro videos from Encyclopedia Britannica’s archives."You're doing it wrong" has become a common headline cliche, a sassier, snarkier version of "8 Questions You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask" and "You'll Never Believe What Happened Next. The people who are employed to write things for the Internet. Well, not the Internet (if, when it comes to precision, we are Doing It Right).