Understanding and Misunderstanding Arendt’s Banality of Evil Today

While we tend to think of evil as a peril of anti-democratic regimes, its banal form as an inability to think about the effect and meaning of our own actions can spread through institutions regardless of the regime.

After observing the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt came up with the phrase “banality of evil”. In her eyes, Eichmann, one of the key implementers of the ‘Final Solution’, appeared not as some devilish monster, but as a pathetic thoughtless little man.

The evil done by him is the inability to form authentic thoughts beyond the ideological clichés that Eichmann recited time and time again, and the inability to think for himself. This banal evil is limitless, which is how millions of lives can be claimed by it because the spread of this evil does not depend on the involvement of bad people, who genuinely intend to do harm, it is bottomless as it can never be satisfied.

The book Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, released in 1963, provokes heated discussions to this day. So much, that the debate regarding the appropriateness of the example of Eichmann to illustrate the thesis of the banality of evil, at times overshadows the new type of evil that we, modern societies, are bound to grapple with.