Hannah Arendt: The Banality of Evil

The American-German philosopher Hannah Arendt, famous for her works The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and her unfinished work The Life of the Mind, is perhaps even better known for her phrase “the banality of evil.”

Imagine a man sitting at a typewriter. He is no monster. He wears no horns, and he surely wields no power. All he does all day is type out letters, stamp envelopes, and try to impress his seniors. That image disturbed Hannah Arendt when she watched Adolf Eichmann’s trial and later wrote about it in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She argued that Eichmann, who was a Nazi official, was not a demon in the storybook sense. He was merely a thoughtless bureaucrat, an ordinary functionary whose obedience helped carry out extraordinary crimes during the Nazi Holocaust.

That phrase, “the banality of evil,” became famous because it captured a modern fear. If a man could help organize mass murder without seeming deeply monstrous, then perhaps modern life itself had begun to produce a new kind of cruelty. Arendt thought the great danger lay in bureaucracy, in systems that turn people into cogs and teach them not to think too hard about what they are doing. But Stephen Miller’s critique in 1988 warns that the phrase can mislead us. Evil acts are not banal just because they are committed by a dull person in a suit. The crimes remain monstrous. What is banal, Miller argues, is the language, the habits, and the clichés that can surround such acts, not the evil itself. Eichmann’s ideas were not ordinary in any innocent sense. They were part of a murderous ideology.

James Sloan Allen takes the matter further. He argues that modernity changed the relationship between evil and the ordinary. In older times, people imagined evil as passionate, grand, or dramatic. Modern life, by contrast, made violence more impersonal and routine. At the same time, the banal, everyday world took on a strange power of its own. Bureaucracy, habits, social routine, and repetitive work could begin to rule human life from within. In Allen’s view, modern people did not only discover evil in the ordinary; they also discovered that the ordinary itself could become menacing. The commonplace could become a trap. The will could weaken. People could begin to feel ruled by small, repetitive things until they no longer believed they had the strength to resist them.

So, the banality of evil is not about a particular Nazi regime. It is about the everyday. It is not so much about power as it is about the everyday that shapes that power. When routine and clichés start ruling over our conscience, we can rest assured that the banality of evil is close at hand. Sometimes evil does not begin in madness. Sometimes it may very well begin in normality.