Are Arendt's reflections on evil still relevant?

Review of Politics

Volumn 70, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 64-76

  Bernstein, Richard J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 57749134426     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S003467050800017X     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. rev. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1968).
2. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 134.
3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 287.
4. See Margaret Canovan's discussion of Arendt's "thought-trains" in her introduction to Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
5. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 77.
6. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963 Ibid., 79.
7. Samantha Power, "Hannah Arendt's Lesson," New York Review of Books (April 29, 2004 ), 37.
8. Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995 ), 166.
9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 441.
10. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 437.
11. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 447.
12. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 451.
13. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 452.
14. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 455.
15. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz; and, The Reawakening: Two Memoirs, trans. StuartWoolf (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 90.
16. See also Giorgio Agamben's discussion of the Musselmann in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Danile Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
17. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 277.
18. Ibid., 277.
19. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 458.
20. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 291-292
21. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Ibid., 295-296
22. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: The Grove Press, 1978), 250-251
23. Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
24. Seyla Benhabib, "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative," Social Research 57, no.1 (Spring 1990): 185.
25. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 252.
26. Hannah Arendt, "Thinking and Mortal Considerations: A Lecture," Social Research 38 , no.3 (Fall, 1971): 417.
27. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 276.
28. Christopher R. Browning, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, sums up the judgment of many historians when he writes: "I consider Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil' a very important insight for understanding many of the perpetuators of the Holocaust, but not Eichmann himself. Arendt was fooled by Eichmann's strategy of self-representation in part because there were so many perpetrators of the kind he was pretending to be." In his recent biography of Eichmann, David Cesarani sets out to show how mistaken Arendt was in her characterization of Eichmann (Eichmann: His Life and Crimes [London: William Heinemann, 2004]).
29. But ironically, as Barry Gewen remarks in his recent review, "Cesarani believes his details add up to a portrait at odds with Arendt's banal bureaucrat, but what is striking is how far his research goes to reinforce her fundamental arguments" ("A Portrait of Eichmann as an Ordinary Man," International Herald Tribune, May 12, 2006).
30. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 271-272
31. Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship," Listener, August 6, 1964 .
32. Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, 386.
33. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil, 246-247