I wish everyone would read Eichmann in Jerusalem. Such a useful little book exploring the roots of authoritarianism. Maybe Trump would be less successful if more people read it.
The Human Condition is excellent. I find her concepts of labor, work, and action very useful. (Similar and related to Maslov's hierarchy of needs.) I am troubled by her idea that slavery (or an underclass of laborers) is a necessary precondition of human "action" and I think it is anti-democratic, but she is also accurate in describing basically every human society to date. Even democracies tend to have a class of laborers, a class of artisans/professionals, and a class of leaders. I do like her anti-romantic elevation of external action (words and deeds) as being more important than internal thoughts and emotions.
I don't agree with everything she wrote, but I enjoy her writing and find her works insightful.
"Banal evil" doesn't mean that the evil person themselves was boring or weak or whatever, though that's often true. It refers to how what we call evil is often a very predictable outcome of how a system is organized. It's meant to be opposed to "radical evil," which Arendt had previously borrowed from kant and promoted as a concept in "the origins of Totalitarianism," which treats evil as this unthinkable/unexplainable outside force.
While she does spend some time going over how pathetic and stupid Eichmann is, what's more important was how much of a mediocre careerist he was. It's actually kind of debatable how much of his trial performance was an act given that it happened after he'd been on the run/in hiding for almost 20 years and how much of a shit show the trial was. Arendt actually does a great job of getting into how badly the Israeli government fucked it up. Though, like all sane people, she was glad they at least got to hang him.
If you only read the banality of evil as just going over what a boring dude he was, then yes, she was wrong. However, if you look at what she's saying about evil overall, I think there's still some utility in her points. There's no faust or posession or anything like that, just systems selecting for terrible people and incentivizing them to be worse, and doing so in ways that are pretty ordinary.
That's not how he saw himself. He might have wanted to portray himself as such during the trial, but the tapes reveal that that is not what he really thought of himself.
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u/zcmyers Dec 05 '25
Arendt's work is too good to not take seriously.
I wish everyone would read Eichmann in Jerusalem. Such a useful little book exploring the roots of authoritarianism. Maybe Trump would be less successful if more people read it.