The Banality of Evil

In her description of Eichmann as an exemplar of the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt was describing a new kind of perpetrator—not new in the sense of being the first of his kind but new to our usual taxonomy of evildoers. Arendt writes, “Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth.” Into our catalogue of violent sociopaths, sadistic murderers, evil geniuses, and subhuman fiends, we now had to insert something that was less extreme, less recognizable as evil, and thus, perhaps, more disturbing: the bureaucrat who murders without any recognizable evil intentions or feelings of hatred.