What Hannah Arendt Actually Meant by Banality

Hannah Arendt sat in Jerusalem in 1961 watching Adolf Eichmann answer questions from a glass booth, reporting for The New Yorker. The man who had organized transports to the death camps was, she wrote, not a demon. He was a clerk. He spoke in officialese, struggled to formulate a sentence that wasn't a stock phrase. "The longer one listened to him," she wrote, "the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think — namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else."

The subtitle of the book, published in 1963, was "A Report on the Banality of Evil." The phrase detonated. Critics read "banal" as "ordinary," and "ordinary" as "forgivable," and concluded Arendt had let Eichmann off the hook. She spent years insisting she had not. Her claim was about a kind of evil not driven by sadism or grand ideology, but by a refusal of the basic mental work of imagining the people on the other side of one's paperwork.

Arendt thought thinking was a moral activity — internal examination, talking with oneself, taking seriously the standpoint one wasn't currently occupying. Eichmann, on her account, had given that up. He was not stupid. He was not insane. He was, in the technical sense she was building, thoughtless.

In 2014, Bettina Stangneth published Eichmann Before Jerusalem, drawing on tapes Eichmann had made in Argentina before his capture. The man on those tapes is not a clerk. He is an ideologically committed antisemite, proud of his role. Stangneth argues Arendt got conned by Eichmann's courtroom performance.

The two readings sit closer than the controversy admits. Eichmann could be a true believer who, on the witness stand, retreated into the cliché register he had practiced for a career. Arendt's point about thoughtlessness as a vehicle for evil survives. Whether her specific defendant was the example is another matter.