Hannah Arendt, evil, and political resistance

Abstract

While Hannah Arendt claimed to have abandoned her early conception of radical evil for a banal one, recent scholarship has questioned that conclusion. This article contributes to the debate by arguing that her conceptual alteration is best understood by engaging with the structure of norms subtending each conception. From this, I develop a compatibilist understanding that accounts for Arendt’s movement from a radical to a banal conception of evil, by claiming that it was because she came to reject the foundationalism of the former for the non-foundationalism of the latter, where norms are located from an ineffable ‘source’ diffusely spread throughout the society. While it might be thought that this means that such norms are all-encompassing to the extent that they determine individual action, I appeal to her notions of plurality, action, and natality, to argue that she defends the weaker claim that moral norms merely condition action. This demonstrates how Arendt’s conceptions of evil complement one another, highlights her understanding of the action–norms relation, and identifies that there is built into Arendt’s conception(s) of evil a resource for resisting totalitarian domination.

Evil, thinking, and emotions in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy: Implications for the teaching of democratic citizenship

“…However, scholars have identified some limits in Arendt's conceptualization of thinking and thoughtlessness. In particular, there seems to be a disjunction between the high-level thinking of Eichmann in his role in the Nazi regime, and his apparent inability to undertake such thinking as evidenced at his trial (Rae, 2019;Veltesen, 2001). This disjunction has been explained by a distinction made by Veltesen (2001) between substantively oriented and instrumentally orientated thinking.…”

“…The word 'banal' that she uses does not imply that the terrible evil crimes for which Eichmann was responsible are banal; as Benhabib (1996) explains, the phrase 'banality of evil' 'was meant to refer to a specific quality of mind and character of the doer himself, and neither to the deeds nor to the principles behind those deeds' (45). Arendt's (1963) claim is that Eichmann was not a 'monster' (p. 54) but an 'ordinary' person who lacked thoughtfulness, the trait that Arendt focuses on (Rae, 2019). As she writes:…”

“…(140) Consequently, it may be suggested that Eichmann was incapable of substantive thinking; his ability was to exercise instrumental thinking. According to Rae (2019), this distinction implies that Arendt's claim that evil is linked to thoughtlessness needs to be refined so that it refers to the inability for substantive thinking.…”

“…(Arendt, 1972: 161) In one of her first essays after the end of World War II, Arendt (1945) wrote that 'the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe ' (p. 134; added emphasis). The question of how human beings could do such evil to each other occupied Arendt throughout most of her life, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust (Cotkin, 2007;Rae, 2019;Waxman, 2009). While she initially developed a conception of evil as 'radical' to describe the radical dimensions of totalitarian evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1951), she subsequently suggested the highly controversial idea of 'the banality of evil' and its link to thoughtlessness in Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt, 1963).…”

Arendt, Hannah

“…In The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, Arendt connects the unforgivable and unpunishable with Immanuel Kant's concept of radical evil (Arendt 1976, 459;Arendt 1998, 241). Later, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), these remarks on evil are developed into her controversial claim that Adolf Eichmann's deeds exemplify "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" (Arendt 1994, 252;also Birmingham 2003;Rae 2019). Arendt argues that evil deeds do not require evil motives: except for looking out for his own advantage, Eichmann "had no motives at all" (Arendt 1994, 287).…”