The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. She had spent a decade thinking about totalitarianism and had written of 'radical evil': something monstrous that the existing political vocabulary could not accommodate. She expected, by her own account, to see a monster.

What she reported instead was a man in a glass booth who spoke almost entirely in bureaucratic cliché, who was preoccupied with the fact that he had not been promoted as far as he deserved, and who, when pressed, produced stock phrases that did not fit the questions. He was not stupid. He was, she concluded, unable to think, not in the sense of reasoning, at which he was perfectly competent, but in the sense of being able to represent the world from someone else's position.

She subtitled the book 'A Report on the Banality of Evil', and that phrase has done more damage to her reputation than anything else she wrote, because it is almost universally read as a claim that the evil was banal. It is not. It is a claim about the perpetrator. The deeds were monstrous; the doer was ordinary. And that, she thought, was the genuinely frightening finding, because it meant the precondition for administering enormous harm is not rare or demonic but common and widely distributed.

The diagnosis rests on an idea she took from Socrates. Thinking, for Arendt, is a dialogue with oneself (the two-in-one) and it is what makes conscience possible, because the person you argue with is someone you then have to live with. Socrates would rather be at odds with the whole world than with himself, since he cannot get away from himself. Someone who cannot conduct that internal dialogue has no interior audience to object to what they are doing. Conscience, on this view, is not a faculty that some people have and others lack; it is a by-product of an activity that some people never perform.

Put this next to her earlier account of totalitarianism and the shape becomes clear. Totalitarian rule, she had argued, is not extreme tyranny; tyranny wants obedience and otherwise leaves private life alone. Totalitarianism destroys the space between people in which politics and judgement happen, isolates them, and replaces judgement with ideological necessity, pursuing consistency past the point of any practical interest. It runs death trains during a military collapse. Eichmann is what such a system produces at the level of one man, and he is not an aberration within it but its characteristic output.

The book caused one of the fiercest intellectual controversies of the century, mostly for reasons other than this. Her pages on the Jewish Councils (arguing that the Nazis had extracted administrative cooperation from Jewish community leaders, and that this had raised the death toll) were received as blaming the victims. Her tone, which is dry and frequently sardonic about a subject nobody was being sardonic about, made it worse. Friendships of thirty years ended and were not repaired. Some of the criticism was unfair and some of it was not.

Later scholarship has also complicated her central portrait. The Sassen interviews (recordings Eichmann made in Argentina before his capture, in which he speaks with evident ideological commitment and regrets only that the job was not finished) suggest that the greyness in the courtroom was substantially a performance for a court that might hang him. Bettina Stangneth's work makes that case in detail. This does not refute the general claim about thoughtlessness, but it does mean Eichmann may have been a poor example of it.

The reason it survives anyway is that the mechanism she identified turns out to be everywhere, and not only in death camps. A bureaucracy distributes an action so finely that no one involved experiences themselves as its author: each person signs a form, approves a stage, implements a policy, and the outcome belongs to nobody. Arendt called this rule by Nobody, and observed that it is the most tyrannical form of rule precisely because there is no one left to hold responsible or to appeal to.

Her demand, against all of that, is unfashionably simple. Judgement cannot be delegated upward. A person is obliged to stop and represent to themselves what it is that they are actually doing, which is the one thing she believed Eichmann never did.