Illuminating Evil: Hannah Arendt and Moral History

Abstract

Hannah Arendt's well-known examinations of the problem of evil are not contradictory and they are central to her corpus. Evil can be banal in some cases (Adolf Eichmann) and radical (the phenomenon of totalitarianism) in others. But behind all expressions of evil, in Arendt's formulations, is the imperative that it be confronted by thinking subjects and thoroughly historicized. This led her away from a view of evil as radical to one of evil as banal. Arendt's ruminations on evil are illuminated, in part, by concerns that she shared with her fellow New York intellectuals about the withering effects of mass culture upon individual volition and understanding. In confronting the challenges of evil, Arendt functioned as a “moral historian,” suggesting profitable ways that historians might look at history from a moral perspective. Indeed, her work may be viewed as anticipating a “moral turn” currently afoot in the historical profession.

Hannah Arendt, evil, and political resistance

“…Only the good has depth and can be radical. (Arendt, 2007: 470–1)Arendt’s movement from radical evil to banal evil was not then because she aimed to demystify political elites (Phillips, 2004) or develop a concrete historical hermeneutics (Cotkin, 2007); it was because she came to recognize that the logical structure underpinning the notion of radical evil failed to understand how political life is structured. With this, she abandoned the foundationalism inherent in radical evil to adopt and develop the non-foundationalism inherent in the notion of banal evil, wherein norms are fungal-like, slowly spreading immanently throughout society.…”

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

“…(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).…”

“…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). Although The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem were the major works in which Arendt theorized evil, she provided several commentaries on the problem of evil in other writings until the end of her life in 1975 (Cotkin, 2007).…”