I would like to consider a phenomenon I have never encountered with any other work of philosophy: the violent – no, hysterical – reaction to Eichmann in Jerusalem, which accompanies a misreading of the text so crude and grotesque you would think it could only occur in the most ill trained of superficial readers. The misreading does occur among such readers, but since I have often encountered it among masterful scholars, whose patience and erudition illuminated difficult texts for the rest of us – and even among masterful scholars who knew and revered Arendt personally – it cannot be a reaction born of sloppiness. The outrage that the book continues to produce, rooted in the claim that Arendt excused the criminals and blamed the victims, is so widespread that they point to something deeper.

Arendt herself was sufficiently hurt and bewildered by the reactions to beat a cheap retreat: The book was not a theory, nor did it propose a new analysis or understanding of evil; it was simple description. She wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem as a journalist doing nothing but reporting what she saw. In saying this, she was assuming at best an air of naiveté that ill became her. Eichmann in Jerusalem is not a piece of journalism; it is one of the best pieces of moral philosophy that the twentieth century has to offer. (Let us not get distracted by the fact that it was originally written for the New Yorker – Kant wrote fifteen of his most important texts for the Berlinische Monatschrift, the eighteenth-century version of the New York Review). The problems with Eichmann in Jerusalem are not, as sometimes suggested, problems of expression. Arendt's command of language was something awesome – particularly daunting in view of the fact that English was her fifth language. Nobody is perfect, but anyone capable of the range of irony and passion her writings invariably display is unlikely to make such a gross error of tone that would make the offending parts of the book simply mistaken.