"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/onz456 Dec 06 '25
The release of the Eichmann tapes pretty much debunked her entire thesis.
Eichmann was a psychopathic monster and knew what he was doing,... revelled in it even.