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Is radical evil banal? Is banal evil radical?

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

There has been much recent debate concerning how Hannah Arendt's concepts of radical evil and the banality of evil `fit together', if at all. I argue that the first of these concepts deals with a certain type of evil, in particular the evil that occurred in the Nazi death camps. The second deals with a certain type of perpetrator of evil, in particular the banal `nobody', Eichmann. As such, bar a localized incompatibility in regard to Arendt's early account of the motivation of perpetrators of radical evil, these two concepts are independent but nonetheless highly complementary.

Key Words: Hannah Arendt • banality of evil • Adolf Eichmann • evil • forgiveness • Immanuel Kant • punishment • radical evil

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 33, No. 6, 717-735 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0191453707080585


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