Hannah Arendt's Eichmann Reconsidered‪.‬

DOES THINKING prevent evil? Can critical self-reflection protect a person from participating in evil, particularly in a totalitarian regime? The distinguished political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) thought so. Her famous 1963 case study Eichmann in Jerusalem advanced the thesis that Adolf Eichmann's inability to think--his extraordinary shallowness--led him blindly to pursue evil. His supervision of genocide could not be attributed to great vice, to culpable passions, to the influence of ideology, or to the existence of misplaced idealism. He was not monstrous, or demonic, or even stupid, merely banal. Eichmann was the sort of mindless bureaucrat who was essential to the functioning of a totalitarian state. Arendt was one of her age's greatest intellectuals. She highly valued thinking. She valued it for its own sake. Yet, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she provided an additional, utilitarian rationale for thinking. (1) Properly exercised, it could help people avoid moral catastrophe. Arendt spent the last twelve years of life theorizing about what it meant to think, and specifically what it meant to think in practical terms about moral and political matters. (2) Her works addressing this issue are widely acknowledged to be substantial and provocative. Yet, in the end, like most intellectuals, Arendt overvalued the power of thinking, in this instance overestimating its influence on individual conduct.