This week, the HBS hosts discuss Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil.

In 1961, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel for crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish People. The philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker. Her articles were collected in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which had the subtitle, A Report on the Banality of Evil. What did she mean by the phrase “banality of evil?” She remarks that there is nothing monstrous, hideous, or outrageous about Eichmann that one could point to as the root of his evil actions. Rather, she argued, he was “thoughtless,” that is, he lacked the imagination to understand the position of others. In this way, the evil he brought about has its source in a kind of unremarkable everydayness. Is her notion useful to us today to think about the multiple evils we confront?

In this episode, we discuss the following texts, ideas, and creators:

• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt (Viking Press, 1963)
• The concept of radical evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Schocken Books, 1951)
• The Milgram Experiment
• The photos from Abu Ghraib
• The Wansee Conference that worked out the “final solution”
• The Irish philosopher George Berkeley
• The push against the autonomy of anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine
• The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno et al. (Wiley and Sons, 1964)
• Senator Joni Ernst’s retort that “we’re all going to die”