The Final--and Fatal--Verdict on Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil" Trope

Why would such a brilliant scholar come up with such a stupid idea? Here's why:

How Arendt could believe that someone like Eichmann could thrive in an organization whose raison d’être was mass murder, shorn of the ideological zeal described by Himmler, is difficult to fathom. Yet, time and again, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, she maintained that Eichmann could best be described as a mere “functionary.” “I don’t believe that ideology played much of a role,” Arendt repeatedly insisted, “to me that appears to be decisive.” 

In this respect, Arendt’s findings dovetailed with a general trend in accounts of the Holocaust that downplayed the role of individual perpetrators in favor of the impersonal “structures” of modern society. But white-collar workers and “organization men” do not as a matter of course commit mass murder unless they are in the grip of an all-encompassing, exterminatory world view, such as the Nazi credo that SS officers were obligated to internalize. As Walter Laqueur noted during the late 1990s: Arendt’s “concept of the ‘banality of evil’ . . . made it possible to put the blame for the mass murder at the door of all kind of middle level bureaucrats. The evildoer disappears, or becomes so banal as to be hardly worthy of our attention, and is replaced by . . . underlings with a bookkeeper mentality.” 

In seeking to downplay the German specificity of the Final Solution by universalizing it, Arendt also strove to safeguard the honor of the highly educated German cultural milieu from which she herself hailed. A similar impetus underlay Arendt’s contention, in her contribution to the Festschrift for Heidegger’s 80th birthday, that Nazism was merely a “gutter-born phenomenon” and had nothing to do with the spiritual (geistige) questions of culture. In light of what we now know about the extent of educated German support for the regime (not to speak of what we know about Heidegger, on which see my earlier essay “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks” in this magazine) Arendt’s notion that Nazism has nothing to do with the “language of the humanities and the history of ideas” appears naïve. 

In retrospect, Arendt’s application of Heidegger’s concept of “thoughtlessness” to Eichmann and his ilk seems to have been intended to absolve the German intellectual traditions. Even Arendt’s otherwise stalwart champion, Mary McCarthy, pointed out the crucial differences between the English word “thoughtlessness,” which suggests a boorish absent-mindedness, and the German Gedankenlosigkeit, which literally indicates an inability to think.

I think there's another factor at play here. Arendt was a deeply conflicted Jew, to put it mildly, who was disgusted by her own Jewishness and who had internalized the Judenhass of the Jews' enemies, including her philosopher lover. She may not have been disgusted enough to seek to eliminate all Juden, a la the Nazis, but she was certainly disgusted enough to wish to do Israel harm. In that sense, she's not all that different from the lefty Jewish intelligentsia of today (who still embrace her pronouncements about "banality").