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Eichmann in Jerusalem
Arendt's 1963 report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann — subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil — one of the most controversial works of twentieth-century political thought and the source of her most famous and most misunderstood phrase.
Arendt traveled to Jerusalem in 1961 on assignment for The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi functionary responsible for organizing the transport of Jews to the death camps. Her reports, collected and expanded as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, argued that Eichmann was not the demonic anti-Semite the prosecution portrayed but a mediocrity — a man of limited imagination who had organized mass murder through careerism and thoughtlessness rather than through monstrous ideology. The book produced a decades-long controversy, damaged Arendt's relationships with members of the New York Jewish intellectual community, and introduced into the language a phrase — the banality of evil — whose meaning continues to be debated.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Arendt's argument had three components. First, Eichmann as observed at trial lacked the diabolical features a conventional account of evil would require; he was