De Filosemiet en de Antisemiet 8

In her account of the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt famously abandoned the idea of ‘radical evil’ and used the term ‘banality of evil’ to understand the event. First, banality of evil faces up to the fact that Eichmann was himself a banal individual, motivated by little more than a certain conformism and careerism. Second, banality of evil stresses that perpetrators of horrific deeds can be ordinary men without any history of psychological disorder or ideological commitment. Third, banality of evil refers to the emergence of a new type of bourgeois: not the morally reflective individual of Kantian philosophy but the ‘mass-man’ who conceives of himself as a cog in a machine. Fourth, banality of evil expresses the humanistic insight that evil is never radical, only extreme, and possesses ‘neither depth nor demonic dimension’.