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Are Arendt's Reflections on Evil Still Relevant?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2008

Richard J. Bernstein
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Abstract

The relevance of Arendt's reflections on evil is analyzed in three respects. She warns that the appeal to absolutes (good or evil) destroys politics; her claim that radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous is relevant to contemporary concerns with the vast refugee and stateless populations; and her idea of the banality of evil focuses our attention on the evil deeds that persons commit even when they do not have evil motives or intentions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 1: Special Issue on Comparative Political Theory , Winter 2008 , pp. 64 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

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References

1 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. rev. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 Arendt, Hannah, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Kohn, Jerome (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 134Google Scholar.

3 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 287Google Scholar.

4 See Margaret Canovan's discussion of Arendt's “thought-trains” in her introduction to Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

5 Arendt, Hannah, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 77Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 79.

7 Power, Samantha, “Hannah Arendt's Lesson,” New York Review of Books (April 29, 2004), 37Google Scholar.

8 Arendt, Hannah and Jaspers, Karl, Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Kohler, Lotte and Saner, Hans, trans. Robert, and Kimber, Rita (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), 166Google Scholar.

9 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 441.

10 Ibid., 437.

11 Ibid., 447.

12 Ibid., 451.

13 Ibid., 452.

14 Ibid., 455.

15 Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz; and, The Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. Woolf, Stuart (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 90Google Scholar. See also Giorgio Agamben's discussion of the Musselmann in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Danile Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

16 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 277.

17 Ibid., 277.

18 Ibid., 458.

19 Ibid., 291–92.

20 Ibid., 295–96.

21 Arendt, Hannah, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Feldman, Ron H. (New York: The Grove Press, 1978), 250–51Google Scholar.

22 Bernstein, Richard J., Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

23 Benhabib, Seyla, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” Social Research 57, no.1 (Spring 1990): 185Google Scholar.

24 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 252.

25 Arendt, Hannah, “Thinking and Mortal Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (Fall, 1971): 417Google Scholar.

26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 276.

27 Christopher R. Browning, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, sums up the judgment of many historians when he writes: “I consider Arendt's concept of the ‘banality of evil’ a very important insight for understanding many of the perpetuators of the Holocaust, but not Eichmann himself. Arendt was fooled by Eichmann's strategy of self-representation in part because there were so many perpetrators of the kind he was pretending to be.” In his recent biography of Eichmann, David Cesarani sets out to show how mistaken Arendt was in her characterization of Eichmann (Eichmann: His Life and Crimes [London: William Heinemann, 2004]). But ironically, as Barry Gewen remarks in his recent review, “Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments” (“A Portrait of Eichmann as an Ordinary Man,” International Herald Tribune, May 12, 2006).

28 Neiman, Susan, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 271–72Google Scholar.

29 Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Listener, August 6, 1964.

30 Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, 386.

31 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil, 246–47.