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Is radical evil banal? Is banal evil radical?

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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.

SAGE Publications

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Title: Is radical evil banal? Is banal evil radical?

Description:

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.

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