The Banality of Evil Appears Once in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in a Sentence About a Hanging

Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" occurs exactly once in the body of her 1963 report on the Eichmann trial, and what she did with it over the following twelve years is stranger than the fight over whether Eichmann was banal.

In the dark hours between the last night of May 1962 and the first morning of June, at Ayalon Prison in Ramla, a slight, balding man of fifty-six was walked to a scaffold. He was composed. He declared his loyalty to Germany, to Austria, and to Argentina, and then the trapdoor opened. Afterward his body was burned and the ashes were scattered at sea, so that no ground anywhere could become a shrine. Hannah Arendt was not present. Almost nobody was. She reconstructed the last minutes of Adolf Eichmann from press reports and official accounts, and she used them to close her book.

What she wrote about that scaffold is the only place in the narrative body of Eichmann in Jerusalem where the phrase everyone knows appears. In the face of death, she observed, the man had reached for the cliché used in funeral oratory, and the effect was of a summing up: he was giving back "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us," which she then named, in the final clause of the final chapter, as "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." That is the whole of it. The phrase occurs once in the text of the 1963 book, and then once more in the Postscript added for the revised edition of 1964, a defense written after the damage was done. Add the subtitle on the jacket and the count reaches three. The philosopher Christoph Menke, noting the same thing, put it in a parenthesis, which is roughly the weight the phrase carries inside the book that carries it.

There is no chapter on it. No definition anywhere in the book, and no paragraph of argument leading up to the phrase or unpacking it afterward. The most influential four words in twentieth-century moral philosophy arrive on the last page like a caption and are never explained by the text that produced them.

Arendt turns 120 this year, and the anniversary has given the argument a new set of rooms to happen in. She was born on 14 October 1906 in a house on the market square in Linden, then an industrial town and now a district of Hannover, and the city has been running a program in her name since the spring: a lecture on Nazi-era provenance research at the Museum August Kestner, a citywide read-along called Hannover liest Hannah, a theater piece at Ballhof 2 titled Denken ohne Geländer, thinking without a banister. The main festival week falls on 22 to 26 September. At Bard College, the Hannah Arendt Center marks its twentieth anniversary with the Arendt Forum in Olin Hall on 15 to 17 October, opening the day after the birthday. The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, turns seventy-five in the same year. The commemorations will produce a great many sentences about the banality of evil. Few of them will mention how little of the phrase there is to go around.

A Report on the Banality of Evil, and the Book Underneath It

The phrase reached print before the book did. Arendt's account of the trial ran in The New Yorker across five consecutive issues in February and March 1963. Viking published the book version that spring under the subtitle A Report on the Banality of Evil, and the subtitle did something the closing sentence had not: it announced a thesis. An observation about one man's funeral oratory was now a description of the entire enterprise. It has appeared on the jacket of every printing since.

The uproar that followed was, at first, about something else entirely. What detonated in the spring of 1963 was her handful of pages on the Jewish councils, the community bodies the Nazi authorities forced into existence and then used to administer deportation lists. Arendt read those councils as evidence of how totalitarian domination works at its extreme, converting every available choice, including refusal, into a form of participation. Her critics read an accusation of complicity. Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish mysticism and an old correspondent, wrote her an open letter charging her with a lack of love for the Jewish people and a heartless irony toward the dead. She answered that she had never loved any people or collective, that she loved only her friends, and she noted that he had disputed no fact in her account. The friendship did not survive.

Set against that, the phrase looked almost incidental. Within a few years it had outlived every other element of the controversy and become the thing the book was for. The Postscript she wrote for the 1964 edition reads like someone trying to call a runaway back by name. She used the phrase, she explained there, "only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial," and she insisted she was advancing no thesis or doctrine about evil at all. The report had made no claim she could retract, because it had made no claim. It had made an observation, and an observation cannot be defended the way an argument can.

That asymmetry shaped everything afterward. The phrase was portable because it was undefined. It could be lifted out of a report on one SS transport officer and dropped onto office life or corporate wrongdoing, onto any occasion where paperwork stands between a person and a consequence. Nothing in the original sentence resisted the transfer. Arendt objected to those transfers for the rest of her life.

Thoughtlessness Was the Word She Wanted

What she saw in the glass booth was a man who spoke almost entirely in ready-made phrases. Eichmann's German, she noticed, was a warehouse of official formulations, and he moved between them without registering that they contradicted each other. He was the small man in a large machine. He was also the officer who had personally deplored the violence, and the administrator proud of the efficiency with which he had moved trains full of people to their deaths. His lawyer kept steering him away from the contradictions. He kept steering back.

This was not stupidity, and she was emphatic about that. Eichmann had coordinated deportation logistics across a continent at war and survived the internal politics of a murderous bureaucracy, which are not achievements available to a stupid man. The deficiency was narrower and, in her account, worse. He had no interior distance from his own function. There was no position inside him from which the role could be examined, no self that stood slightly apart from the officeholder and asked what the office was doing. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the technical point plainly: the phrase was never meant as a general theory of evil, but as a description of what she took to be a fact about this defendant's personality, and specifically about "a curious, quite authentic inability to think."

Thinking, for Arendt, had a precise structure borrowed from Socrates. It is a dialogue of the self with itself, a two-in-one in which one part holds a position and the other interrogates it. A person incapable of arguing with himself has no equipment for hearing the argument of anyone else, and the plurality of other people, who register as material and never as perspectives, goes invisible. She reinforced this from Kant's third critique, where aesthetic judgment requires an enlarged mentality, the capacity to think from the standpoint of others before pronouncing. She was still working through those Kantian passages in her 1970 lectures on Kant's political philosophy at the New School.

Which means the phrase excludes far more than it covers. The ordinary murderer acting from rage or greed is not a case of banal evil. Neither, on her analysis, is the committed ideologue who kills from the fullness of a conviction he has inhabited and examined, however monstrous the conviction. Fanaticism is a form of engagement with the question of what one is doing. Banality in her technical sense names the absence of that engagement, the perfect substitution of institutional role for conscience. The nearest thing to a definition she ever produced came in a letter to Scholem in July 1963, where she wrote that evil "is never radical," only extreme, that it "possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension," that it can lay waste to the world because it spreads like a fungus on the surface, and that "only the good has depth and can be radical." That formulation is sharper than anything in the book. It appears in correspondence.

Bettina Stangneth, the Sassen Tapes, and the Argument That Cannot Reach the Phrase

The best-known objection is an archival one, and it deserves a straight hearing before it is set aside. Over a run of Sundays in Buenos Aires in 1957, Eichmann sat in Willem Sassen's living room and talked into a tape recorder. Sassen was Dutch, a former Waffen-SS war correspondent, and he had arranged the sessions with his publisher. Something like seventy hours went onto tape. Fifteen hours of audio survive, along with a transcript running to roughly seven hundred pages. The man on those tapes is not a functionary. He is a boastful antisemite who regrets that the job was left unfinished. Bettina Stangneth built Eichmann Before Jerusalem out of that material and argued that the modest clerk in the glass booth was a performance staged for a courtroom, and that Arendt, who attended only part of the trial, watched the performance and believed it.

The evidence is real, and Arendt did not have most of it. Whatever else is true, the Jerusalem defendant was a constructed one. But this argument, restaged in essay after essay and dramatized again in Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film, cannot get at the thing it is aimed at. Arendt had already conceded in the Postscript that she was making no claim about the contents of Eichmann's convictions. Her observation concerned the mode of his functioning, the manner in which whatever he believed operated without ever being held up and examined. A man can be a convinced antisemite and still never once submit the conviction to the inner dialogue that would make it his own in the moral sense. Those two descriptions are compatible, which is why sixty years of documentary discovery have not dislodged a phrase that made no factual claim capable of being falsified.

There is a second misreading with a longer reach. Stanley Milgram began his obedience experiments at Yale in August 1961, four months into the Jerusalem trial, and they were widely received as empirical confirmation of Arendt's thesis: ordinary people, instructed by an authority, will administer what they believe to be agonizing shocks to strangers. The two accounts describe different things. Milgram demonstrated the force of authority overriding immediate moral discomfort, which is a pressure applied from outside. Arendt described an absence, a capacity inside the man that had gone missing or had never developed.

The sociological reading is the comfortable one, which is part of why it won. If evil is what ordinary people do under institutional pressure, the individual stops being the relevant unit and the remedy is institutional design. Arendt's version puts the burden back where it is heavier. Thinking is a capacity that has to be kept up and that atrophies without use. Certain workplaces and certain political conditions discourage it. Whether a person still has it when the moment arrives is settled by years of habits nobody was watching.

Twelve Years of Explaining the Banality of Evil

From 1963 until her death she kept coming back to the same four words, in postscripts, letters, lectures and interviews, always narrowing, always insisting she had described rather than theorized. The Postscript did double duty as the preface to the German edition, so readers in her first language met the defense before they met the report. In interviews she made the same move by hand, telling questioners that the phrase recorded what had been in front of her at the trial and was not a doctrine anyone was entitled to test. The insistence never took. By the late 1960s the phrase belonged to everybody and meant, in general use, that anyone could become a perpetrator given the right office and the right memo, which is close to the opposite of what she had put on the page.

So she went at the problem from underneath. If the trouble was that nobody could say what thinking is, then that was the book to write. "Thinking and Moral Considerations," which ran in Social Research in the autumn of 1971, had already staked the ground: the impulse for it, she said, came directly from the Jerusalem courtroom and from the problem of a man in whom no wickedness could be located that was adequate to his deeds. Then came the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, one of the oldest philosophical platforms in the English-speaking world, which she was the first woman invited to deliver. She gave the lectures on thinking in 1973 and returned in May 1974 for the lectures on willing, and had a heart attack during the first of them. The project became The Life of the Mind.

Judging was the volume that mattered. Thinking withdraws from the world and dissolves whatever it examines, and Arendt was scrupulous about admitting that it guarantees nothing: it can produce nihilism as easily as insight, and a person who has thought his received values to pieces may conclude that nothing is owed to anyone. Judgment was to be the faculty that returns from that withdrawal and pronounces on the particular case without a rule to apply, the capacity that had been missing in the glass booth. The third volume was where the banality of evil would have been given its argument.

On the evening of 4 December 1975, at her apartment on Riverside Drive, Arendt had guests for coffee and died in her chair of a heart attack at sixty-nine. Two volumes were drafted. Mary McCarthy, her friend and literary executor, brought them out in 1977 and 1978, and for the missing third she substituted excerpts from those 1970 Kant lectures so that readers would have something to work from. Judging itself existed as a sheet of paper in the typewriter carriage, on which Arendt had typed a title and two epigraphs, and after that nothing. What that page was going to say is the most consequential missing document in twentieth-century moral philosophy, and it was going to be the place where a phrase used once in a book about a hanging was finally told what it meant.

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Adapted from a longform audio episode, "The Banality of Evil" | Hannah Arendt's Complete Philosophy For Sleep, produced for Sleepy Philosophy Radio.