The Origins of Totalitarianism
- written in 1951 – Hitler was dead, Stalin was still in power
- explores totalitarianism as a new form of government
- focuses more on Nazism than Stalinism because arendt was more familiar with Germany
- examines the elements that gave rise to totalitarianism (anti-semitism, racism, mass displacement)
- totalitarianism arose in part because of widely felt disconnection from society that allowed populations to become scapegoats
- describes dangers of polarization in representative government
Banality of Evil
- examines the common motives among perpetrators of evil
- claims evil is “thought-defying” because thought searches for depth, and there is no depth in evil
- claims the perpetuation of evil involves a disconnection from reality
- Arendt applies the concept to Adolf Eichman after witnessing his trial
- argues the Nazis used “holes of oblivion” to promote unrealistic ideas of wealth and power to financially struggling Germans
Adolf Eichman
- played a chief role in carrying out the mass execution of Jews during the Holocaust
- coordinated identification and subsequent transportation of Jews to concentration camps
- escaped capture by U.S. troops following WWII, but then got captured, tried, and hanged by the Israeli government
- claimed in trial that he had no knowledge of what happened in the concentration camps
*interesting observation: many of the websites I looked at discussed Hannah Arendt because they perceived her concepts as relevant in the Trump era
