Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? by Richard J. Bernstein

Author:Richard J. Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509528639
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

When Arendt says that he “never realized what he was doing” she doesn’t mean that he acted blindly. He was masterful in arranging the transportation of Jews to concentration and extermination camps. But he lacked the imagination to see things from the perspective of his victims. He lacked what Kant had described as an “enlarged mentality.” In a lecture that Arendt gave at The New School for Social Research in 1970, she returned to the banality of evil, expanding on the point she made in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of “the banality of evil” and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think. He functioned in the role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as though it were nothing but another language rule. (Arendt 1971: 417)

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