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The Evil of Banality

The Evil of Banality PDF Author: Elizabeth K. Minnich
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442275979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil—to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.

The Evil of Banality

The Evil of Banality PDF Author: Elizabeth K. Minnich
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442275979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil—to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101007168
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

The Banality of Evil

The Banality of Evil PDF Author: Bernard J. Bergen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585116962
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
This highly original book is the first to explore the political and philosophical consequences of Hannah Arendt's concept of 'the banality of evil,' a term she used to describe Adolph Eichmann, architect of the Nazi 'final solution.' According to Bernard J. Bergen, the questions that preoccupied Arendt were the meaning and significance of the Nazi genocide to our modern times. As Bergen describes Arendt's struggle to understand 'the banality of evil,' he shows how Arendt redefined the meaning of our most treasured political concepts and principles_freedom, society, identity, truth, equality, and reason_in light of the horrific events of the Holocaust. Arendt concluded that the banality of evil results from the failure of human beings to fully experience our common human characteristics_thought, will, and judgment_and that the exercise and expression of these attributes is the only chance we have to prevent a recurrence of the kind of terrible evil perpetrated by the Nazis.

Eichmann Before Jerusalem

Eichmann Before Jerusalem PDF Author: Bettina Stangneth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307959686
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Book Description
A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann—a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s own recently discovered written notes— as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires—draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives. A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis—from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen—both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust’s principal organizers as no other book has done

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Topeka Bindery
ISBN: 9781417790036
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Hannah Arendts authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendts postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.

The Life of the Mind

The Life of the Mind PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156519922
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 546

Book Description
The author's final work, presented in a one-volume edition, is a rich, challenging analysis of man's mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging. Edited by Mary McCarthy; Indices.

Idealism and Freedom

Idealism and Freedom PDF Author: Henry E. Allison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521482950
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defense of the author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy.

Letters, 1925-1975

Letters, 1925-1975 PDF Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 9780151005253
Category : Philosophers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When they first met in 1925, Martin Heidegger was a star of German intellectual life and Hannah Arendt was his earnest young student. What happened between them then will never be known, but both would cherish their brief intimacy for the rest of their lives. The ravages of history would soon take them in quite different directions. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Heidegger became rector of the university in Freiburg, delivering a notorious pro-Nazi address that has been the subject of considerable controversy. Arendt, a Jew, fled Germany the same year, heading first to Paris and then to New York. In the decades to come, Heidegger would be recognized as perhaps the most significant philosopher of the twentieth century, while Arendtwould establish herself as a voice of conscience in a century of tyranny and war. Illuminating, revealing, and tender throughout, this correspondence offers a glimpse into the inner lives of two major philosophers.

Hitler's Bureaucrats

Hitler's Bureaucrats PDF Author: Yaacov Lozowick
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826479181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
For many, the name Adolf Eichmann is synonymous with the Nazi murder of six million Jews. Alongside Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, he is probably the most infamous of the Nazi murderers; unlike them, the aura linked to his name is that of the ultimate evil that may lurk in each and every one of us. This understanding can be attributed above all to Hannah Arendt, and her seminal book, Eichmann in Jersualem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which she suggested that Eighcmann and many bureaucrats like him never actually realized what they were doing:they were thoughtless rather than consciously evil. By taking this position, Arendt rejected the biblical story of Genesis, which sets the ability to distinguish between right and wrong at the very core of beign human. Instead, she implied that Eichmann represented a potential face of the future. This book claims that she was wrong. It describes the facts as they appear in the documentation created by Eichmann and his colleagues, and suggest that they fully understood what they were doing. The primary motivating force for their actions was a well-developed acceptance of th tenents of Nazi ideology, of which antisemitism was a central component. As far as one is able to determine, after the war not a single one of them ever expressed regret for their actions against the Jews, unless it was regret for having to pay the consequences. These were no run-of-the-mill bureaucrats who merely 'followed orders'.

Evil and Human Agency

Evil and Human Agency PDF Author: Arne Johan Vetlesen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139448840
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents.