Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published by Viking Press in 1963, based on a series of articles Arendt wrote for The New Yorker covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is probably the most controversial work of political philosophy published in the postwar period, and the phrase “the banality of evil” has entered the common language.
Arendt attended the trial expecting to see a monster — the man who had organized the transportation of millions of Jews to the death camps. Instead she saw a mediocrity: a man of limited intelligence, no convictions, and an inability to think beyond the clichés of his bureaucratic role. Eichmann had not hated Jews; he had not wished them dead in any personal sense; he had simply done his job — moving people from place to place — without ever reflecting on what his job entailed. The “banality of evil” was not a theory about evil being trivial but about evil being possible without evil intentions — the result of thoughtlessness rather than malice.
The book’s controversy had several dimensions. Jewish readers and the Israeli establishment were outraged by what they perceived as a diminishment of the Holocaust — if Eichmann was merely banal, where was the recognition of the enormity of what had been done? Arendt’s criticism of the Jewish councils (Judenräte) that had cooperated with the Nazi deportation machinery enraged many who saw it as blaming the victims. Her insistence on thinking clearly about uncomfortable facts, regardless of who was offended, alienated former friends and colleagues.
The philosophical implications of the book were worked out in Arendt’s later work, particularly The Life of the Mind, which she conceived as an investigation of the relationship between thinking and moral judgment — the question of whether the inability to think (which she attributed to Eichmann) is itself a form of moral failure.
Collecting Eichmann in Jerusalem
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket. One of the most important postwar works of political philosophy.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $300–$1,000
- Without jacket: $40–$100
- Revised and enlarged edition (1965): $30–$80
- Penguin paperback first printing: $10–$25