The Banality of Evil: Arendt’s Relevance
March 6, 2007
Shortly after I arrived at this university, I went to the library once to pick up Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem which I needed for my research. I couldn’t find it in the shelves, so I went to the lending desk. They finally located the book in the basement storerooms. Since the book hadn’t been taken out in 35 years, it had been taken off the shelves. From that I concluded how crap the politics department here must be if no one has been bothered to issue this important book in more than 3 decades.
The following excerpts from a piece by Corey Robin in the London Review of Books explain why this book is so important and is more relevant today than any of Arendt’s other books.
It was the singular achievement of Eichmann in Jerusalem… to remind us that the worst atrocities often arise from the simplest of vices. And few vices, in Arendt’s mind, were more vicious than careerism. ‘The East is a career,’ Disraeli wrote. And so was the Holocaust, according to Arendt. ‘What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.’ Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Eichmann was a careerist of the first order. He had ‘no motives at all’, Arendt insisted, ‘except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement’. He joined the Nazis because he saw in them an opportunity to ‘start from scratch and still make a career’, and ‘what he fervently believed in up to the end was success.’ Late in the war, as Nazi leaders brooded in Berlin over their impending fate and that of Germany, Eichmann was fretting over superiors’ refusing to invite him to lunch. Years later, he had no memory of the Wannsee Conference, but clearly remembered bowling with senior officials in Slovakia.
This aspect of Arendt’s treatment of Eichmann is often overlooked in favour of her account of the bureaucrat, the thoughtless follower of rules who could cite the letter of Kant’s categorical imperative without apprehending its spirit. The bureaucrat is a passive instrument, the careerist an architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in paper, the second hoists himself up a ladder. The first was how Eichmann saw himself; the second is how Arendt insisted he be seen.
Most modern theorists, from Montesquieu to the American Framers to Hayek, have considered ambition and careerism to be checks against, rather than conduits of, oppression and tyranny. Arendt’s account of totalitarianism, too, makes it difficult to see how a careerist could survive or prosper among Nazis and Stalinists. Totalitarianism, she argued, appeals to people who no longer care about their lives, much less their careers, and destroys individuals who do. It preys on the dissolution of class structures and established hierarchies – or dissolves those that remain – and replaces them with a shapeless mass movement and a bureaucracy that resembles an onion more than a pyramid.
The main reason for the contemporary evasion of Arendt’s critique of careerism, however, is that addressing it would force a confrontation with the dominant ethos of our time. In an era when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient but also a source of freedom, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism. Unlike the ideologue, whose great sin is to think too much and want too much from politics, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of state power. He is realistic and pragmatic, not utopian or fanatic. That careerism may be as lethal as idealism, that ambition is an adjunct of barbarism, that some of the worst crimes are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas: these are the implications of Eichmann in Jerusalem that neo-cons and neoliberals alike find too troubling to acknowledge.
March 7, 2007 at 3:19 am
This is an interesting post. I shall add this book to my wishlist.
Thank you!
March 7, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Fanonite-I’d have been happy to lend you my copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem.
I think you have homed in on a fascinating aspect of Arendt’s account of the genesis of genocide.Where democracy has begun to ossify because people have lost the will to make it work properly then the most faceless,talentless,and vacuous individuals begin to take their place in the governing elite.
As the rot sets in these individuals forge alliances with the propagandists and war profiteers who have similar plans to hijack the state for their own enrichment.
Yes,you guessed it for Eichmann in the 1930s and 40s read Mandelson,Kinnock,Campbell,Jowell,Short,Reid,Clarke in the 1990s and first decade of this century.These low-life plankton take over when people lose interest in democracy.When they can no longer be arsed to make the necessary effort to acquire the basic knowledge on which they might be able to make the informed decisions necessary to participate as citizens in a democratic system that’s when scumbags like Cheney,Rumsfeld,Bush who represent the military-industrial complex rather than the people take over.
Where the pursuit of power becomes the raison d’etre for the elite,politics is an avenue of advancement for the most feckless and idle characters in society.
War follows as night follows day,as does torture,and curtailment of civil liberties along with the trivialization of the most pressing political and social issues.
Arendt saw all this compressed and distilled in the form of Adolph Eichmann but she also glimpsed the future of the US/UK and Israeli political systems too.
March 8, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Far from being the hateful anti-semite,the prosecution portrayed,Eichmann was the quintessential careerist.
Prior to Hitler’s ascendancy Eichmann,like the chicken farmer,Himmler,was living a “humdrum life without significance and consequence the wind had blown him into history.”
If humanity was to learn any lesson from the evil of Nazism it was not the one Ben Gurion’s targetted kidnapping and show trial of Eichmann would teach them.No if Jews especially were to transcend the grief and destruction inflicted on them by the Holocaust they must see through the manipulations of the trial by which Israel’s political elite wanted to use history to create a society that used its suffering as a mandate for aggression and dispossession of its neighbours.
The truth about the evil that had been done to the Jews was more mundane.It was the acqiescence and acceptance of evil on the part of Eichmann and all those to whom he deferred in the Nazi hierarchy,none of whom questioned the Final Solution,that was the real lesson.This was the banality of evil she detected, not the monstrous evil against which the self-righteous Israeli leadership railed publically, while quietly referring to the Holocaust survivors admitted to Israel as “soap”.
More troubling than this seeming attempt on her part to diminish the significance of their suffering was Arendt’s insistence on the need for Jews to learn from the acquiescence and acceptance of the part of Jewish community leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe.While never denying their having been coerced into confronting the most appalling moral dilemma:who should survive and who should not,Arendt stated bluntly,”this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark history.”
The vituperation of the Israeli Lobby and its minions to Arendt’s account can well be imagined.She never recanted and made clear to hostile,mainly Jewish audiences,that her love of her people (she was herself a Jew)meant that the failings of her people were a graver matter to her than the failings of all other people.
She worried constantly about the state of Israel, seeing in the propagandizing of Ben Gurion and his insistence on the purity of arms of its military the existential dishonesty she despised throughout her life.The Israeli political elite was using Eichmann to justify its state-inspired siege mentality towards its Arab neighbours.The bitter suffering of the Holocaust would not elicit any capacity for empathy with the pain of her neighbours.Rather it would likely beget yet another failure of the human spirit.
Olmert,Likud et al would not have kept Hannah Arendt quiet.She would have seen them for the sad little careerists they are.
March 18, 2007 at 2:35 am
You know, speaking of careerism, couldn’t help thinking of the earlier mentioned Germans … i intend to give Arendt’s book to every single one of them as a birthday gift! But they gloat about their careerism …
June 11, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I really like Corey Robin’s explanation of Arendt in Working Paper 10 and in his book on Arendt. They helped me understand Arendt’s 2 books on totalitarianism and Eichmann
What I don’t quite follow about some of the discussions that go on about the organization man, the Milgram experiment and other explanations of becoming a perpetrator is why careerism should be to blame rather than lack of ethics. I don’t mean that Corey Robin is at fault here, however. If Eichmann had had ethical principles he could have chosen a career that would not hurt anyone. I seem to recall that glory was also one of the incentives of the career promised to SS men. If Eichmann had ethics, then he would not have been blinded by glory, but rather chosen a job that was not wrong, even if it meant foregoing a big career. That seems to be an ethical choice. Furthermore, if hd had thought ahead to the final reckoning, even without strong ethical principles he might also have avoided becoming a criminal. So rational self-interest could also have led to an ethical choice.
Also, it may be that people like Eichmann had some desire to hurt people, independently of their careerism, and this desire found a suitable outlet in the SS career ladder that was not available elsewhere. Not all careerists want to hurt other people or Jews in particular, they may have scruples, they may be farsighted.
It cannot be careerism alone, but rather careerism without morals and foresight that are to blame.
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