The banality of evil: A short analysis of Hanna Arent’s famous book

Trying to understand whether someone can do evil without necessarily being evil, with the thesis surrounding the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt wrote her famous book Eichman In Jerusalem.

Back in 1961, when writing for The New Yorker about Adolph Eichmann’s war crimes trial, the Nazi official in charge of planning the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution, this question kept haunting Hannah Arendt.

Eichmann was a typical bureaucrat who, in Arendt’s opinion, was “terrifyingly normal” and “neither perverted nor sadistic”. He seemed to act solely with the objective of taking his career in the Nazi administration as further as possible. This duality was what originated the whole idea behind the banality of evil.

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In her analysis of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she came to the conclusion that Eichmann was, in fact, not an immoral monster.

The banality of evil: Eichmann In Jerusalem

Arendt’s research led her to believe Eichmann was not a perverse human being. He did wicked things, without intending to, which she linked to this disengagement from the awful reality of his actions.

Hannah claimed Eichmann “never realised what he was doing”, as he was unable to “think from the standpoint of somebody else”. 

Lacking empathy led him to commit “crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong”, at least that’s what Arendt concluded.

According to one modern interpreter of Arendt’s thesis, Eichmann was not inherently evil but rather shallow and illiterate.

To her, it seemed as if he had just stumbled into the Nazi Party, looking for direction and purpose rather than out of a strong ideological conviction. 

In her analysis, she called these particular traits of Eichmann “the banality of evil”, while also establishing a parallel between Eichmann and the main character in Albert Camus’ 1942 book The Stranger, who kills a man at random and without remorse. 

To the view of the readers, the murder merely happened, with no specific motivation or overtly malicious intention.

Arendt’s impression of Eichmann was certainly intriguing, staggering, even. Ten years after Eichmann’s Israeli prosecution, she wrote the following:

“I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. 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”.

The argument behind the banality of evil became a contentious issue, a controversy. 

It was utterly incomprehensible to Arendt’s detractors how Eichmann could have contributed significantly to the Nazi genocide while harboring no malign intent.

It’s no surprise the concept behind the banality of evil arose so many arguments from the opposition. By saying Eichmann lacked the ability to be conscious, thoughtful, and empathetic, didn’t Hannah deny his own ability to be human?

The debate continues. To this day, Hannah’s vision of the banality of evil continues to raise tons of questions.

Against the banality of evil

In Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It (2011), the philosopher Alan Wolfe criticized Arendt for “psychologizing”, or evading, the question of evil as evil by defining it in the constrained framework of Eichmann’s banal existence. 

To Wolfe Arendt overemphasized Eichmann’s persona at the expense of his deeds —the banality of evil—. This emphasis on Eichmann’s unimportant, ordinary life appeared to Arendt’s detractors to be an “absurd digression” from his wicked crimes.

When Arendt stated that Eichmann’s evil was “thought-defying”, as she wrote to the philosopher Karl Jaspers three years after the trial, other subsequent critics have highlighted Arendt’s historical errors, which caused her to miss a deeper evil in Eichmann.

The Israeli government has made documents available for use in the legal proceedings, according to the historian Deborah Lipstadt, who is the defendant in David Irving’s Holocaust denial libel trial, which was decided in 2000. 

In The Eichmann Trial (2011), Lipstadt argues that this demonstrates Arendt’s usage of the term banal was incorrect. “The memoir [by Eichmann] released by Israel for use in my trial reveals the degree to which Arendt was wrong about Eichmann. It is permeated with expressions of Nazi ideology… [Eichmann] accepted and espoused the idea of racial purity”.

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If Eichmann was genuinely unaware of his wrongdoing, Lipstadt continues, Arendt failed to explain why he and his collaborators would have tried to delete the proof of their war crimes.

On the other hand, the German historian Bettina Stangneth, in her book Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), exposes that he had more to him than just being an unremarkable, unpolitical bureaucrat functioning like any other “average” careerist. 

Stangneth portrays Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue who was deeply committed to Nazi beliefs and who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution, drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann conducted by the Nazi journalist William Sassen. 

Eichmann is depicted as a radically evil Third Reich agent hiding inside the deceptively normal exterior of a bland bureaucrat. Eichmann was far from “mindless”, as he had many of the key ideas for the Nazi army.

When Arendt stated ten years after the trial that there was no indication that he had in fact firm convictions related to the Nazis, she utterly overlooked this genuinely terrible side of Eichmann. 

This merely serves to highlight the banality—and fallacies—of the notion about the banality of evil. Although Arendt never said that Eichmann was only a “cog” in the Nazi bureaucracy or that he was justified in doing so because he was nothing but following orders—two widespread misconceptions about her conclusions regarding Eichmann—her opponents, like Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.

What the evil left

One can then wonder, what are the implications of Arendt’s assertion that Eichmann and other Germans committed crimes without being evil? What does the banality of evil say about it?

Arendt lost an opportunity to explore the deeper significance of Eichmann’s specific evil by limiting her investigation of him to a narrower investigation of evil’s nature (the banality of evil), which is why the question is puzzling.

Arendt judged that Eichmann’s evil was banal, that is, “thought-defying”, rather than utilizing the case as a vehicle to further the tradition’s concept of radical evil. Arendt set herself up for failure by adopting a limited legalistic, formalistic approach to the trial, emphasizing that there were no more important matters at stake than the legal facts pertaining to Eichmann’s guilt or innocence.

She, however, had a different stance in her writings prior to Eichmann’s arrival in Jerusalem. She contended in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the Nazis’ wickedness was total and monstrous, not vague and ambiguous, and that they were a metaphor for hell itself: “[T]he reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell”.

Arendt echoed the spirit of philosophers like F W J Schelling and Plato, who did not hesitate to delve into the deeper, more demonic aspects of evil, when she claimed in her writings prior to the Eichmann trial that absolute evil, as exemplified by the Nazis, was motivated by an audacious, monstrous intention to abolish humanity itself. 

Arendt encountered Eichmann, whose bureaucratic emptiness suggested no such devilish depths, only prosaic careerism and the “inability to think”, and this viewpoint was altered. The ‘banality of evil’ tagline was created at that moment when her earlier creative thought about moral evil became sidetracked. 

Furthermore, Arendt passed away in 1975; perhaps had she lived longer, she could have explained the problems with the banality-of-evil theory that continue to baffle critics today. But we will never know this.

As a result, her original thesis is what is left. What fundamental ambiguity underlies it? Arendt was unable to reconcile her perceptions of Eichmann’s sterile bureaucracy with her prior, piercing understanding of the wicked, inhumane crimes of the Third Reich. She did not see the ideologically awful warrior but rather the unassuming functionary.

She couldn’t see how Eichmann’s routine existence could coexist with that “other” horrible wickedness. Despite this, Arendt never discounted Eichmann’s guilt, consistently referred to him as a war criminal, and agreed with the Israeli court’s decision to execute him. 

Although she found Eichmann’s motivations to be enigmatic and counterintuitive, his genocidal actions were not. In the end, Arendt did comprehend the true horror of Eichmann’s wickedness.

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