Dropped One Thing to Read Another: Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil

Always figured I'd get around to it. Saw the movie. The phrase, which she apparently regretted, stuck: The Banality of Evil. Anyway, padding off to bed (inspired by News & News), I thought: The timing seems right. Kindle had it, so now I do.

The "clips below are from the intro:

Introduction THE EXCOMMUNICATION OF HANNAH ARENDT In December 1966, Isaiah Berlin, the prominent philosopher and historian of ideas, was the guest of his friend, Edmund Wilson, the well-known American man of letters. An entry in Wilson’s diary mentions an argument between the two men. Berlin “gets violent, sometimes irrational prejudice against people,” Wilson noted, “for example [against] Hannah Arendt, although he has never read her book about Eichmann.” In a memoir in the Yale Review in 1987, Berlin made exactly the same charge against Wilson and elaborated upon this in a 1991 interview with the editor of Wilson’s diary.1 We don’t know the outcome of this quarrel. One thing we do know: more than three years after the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in print, the civil war it had launched among intellectuals in the United States and in Europe was still seething. Describing the debate that raged through his own and other families in New York, Anthony Grafton later wrote that no subject had fascinated and aroused such concern and serious discussion as the series of articles Hannah Arendt had published in The New Yorker about the Eichmann trial, and the book that grew out of them. Three years after the publication of the book, people were still bitterly divided over it. No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America. The controversy has never really been settled. Such controversies often die down, simmer, and then erupt again. It is perhaps no accident that at this time of a highly controversial war in Iraq, Arendt’s books are still widely read and that, even though close to 300,000 copies of her book on Eichmann alone have so far been sold, this new edition is now published by Penguin.

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Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

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Dostoevsky would not have regarded Arendt’s “banality of evil” as a cheap catchword, as Gershom Scholem did in an open letter to Arendt accusing her of heartlessness. When the devil visits Karamazov, he turns out to be a shabby, stupid, and vulgar lout.

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The scandal soon grew to outsize proportions. Saul Bellow excoriated Arendt in Mr. Sammler’s Planet for using the tragic history of the Holocaust to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals. Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.