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WILLIAM PHILLIPS
titude toward the state. I find no evidence of this in her book. Besides,
would not such an anarchist stand have required a radical consciousness
and organization beyond the reach of a people no better, no worse, no
diff~ent
from the rest of existing middle-class society? The point is not
that the Jews were middle-class; it is that the society, in Europe and
America, of which they were an integral part was middle-class.
The nature of Eichmann is a different kind of question, and has to do
with the relation of individual to collective aberration. And I wish it had
been approached by everyone in a more speculative spirit, for there are
no intellectual rules I know of by which one can dismiss any view of
Eichmann as obviously wrong or distasteful, as some of Hannah's critics
have done. The problem, as I see it, is not so much to grasp the idea of a
man who commits some monstrous acts yet in most of his daily life does
not act in a monstrous way, as to understand what happens when such
men become the social norm. Many if not most criminals are disguised
as ordinary people.
If
this were not so, it would be very easy to prevent
crime and apprehend criminals. The problem of Eichmann is that his
criminality was public and was sanctioned by the beliefs of the community
-a c,ondition that exists everywhere, but is a special feature of totalitarian
societies. Hence, no special moral or political perversion is required to
produce an Eichmann; it might be said that there are thousands of
potential Eichmanns. This is what Hannah means by the banality of
evil, which, by the way, is an unfortunate phrase, since what she must
mean is not that evil is banal but that under the Nazis a banal person,
a person who might have originally delivered the mail or run a grocery
store, was elevated
to
the role of an Eichmann. Now, frankly, I do not
find this a revolutionary or a startling idea; nor is it an offensive one.
The main trouble with it is that it does not allow for the transformation
that must take place in an Eichmann when he "changes jobs," and this
simply perpetrates the cliche of the little man who does awful things
in certain situations. The horror of totalitarianism is precisely that the
"little man" is transformed into an organizer of the "Final Solution."
Still, I do not understand why so many people jumped on Hannah
as though her view of Eichmann was just another instance of her anti–
Semitism, unless, again, it is a question of tone and formulation. Ap–
parently, some of her critics thought she was playing down the mon–
strousness of Eichmann by playing up his banality. As for whether or
not Eichmann was a monster, I prefer to think he was, though I find
the question only of rhetorical interest, since it all depends, as you have
said, on whether we define the term in such a way as to exclude or to
include Eichmann. I also prefer to think that Eichmann was abnormal,
since I feel some talent for abnormality is required to do the things he
