Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt is best known for her writings on political philosophy, most specifically her analysis of the 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Born in Hanover, Germany, Arendt studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, and later with Karl Jaspers. In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for Paris, surviving a brief internment en route. Although Arendt was neither religious nor a Zionist, the rise of the Nazi party and the rapid spread of anti-Semitism through Europe provoked in Arendt a strong consciousness of her Jewish identity. In her intellectual writings of the 1930s, she argued that conditions of freedom and citizenship should never require repudiation of one's ethnic or cultural identity.

Emigrating to New York in 1941, Arendt gained recognition among political theorists and philosophers as a bold and controversial intellectual. She was University Professor in Political Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago. Her major works include The Origins of Totalitarianism, On the Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind.

Most relevant to the field of business ethics is Arendt's authoritative analysis of the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem to report the proceedings in a series of articles for the New Yorker magazine. As she listened to Eichmann's defense of his own motives and actions, Arendt concluded that Eichmann was not a monster but an ordinary man, following orders and doing his job to the best of his ability. He asserted that he bore the Jews no particular ill will and that in different circumstances he wouldn't have taken actions that ultimately killed millions of Jews—he just happened to be the person in that role, a role any number of Germans might have filled as well as he did. It was precisely this inability to think about the moral implications of his actions that led Arendt to characterize Eichmann's evil as banal. This characterization was a radical departure from previous sociological, philosophical, and psychological analyses of evil. Furthermore, Arendt asserted that the Holocaust could not have happened without the collaboration of Jewish organizations. In this, she was not blaming the victims but describing an essential component of the Nazi strategy to force cooperation and thereby undercut Jewish resistance solidarity. For these views, she was accused of insulting Jewish victims of Nazi genocide and including them as blameworthy in accounting for the atrocities of World War II.

In contemporary social analysis, the term the banality of evil has come to generally indicate the ease with which immoral actions, such as lying, stealing, falsifying records, and violating rules, are accepted into daily life. Indeed, the term Eichmann has come to represent that potential in each of us to be blind to the moral impact of our actions.