Between banality and radicality: Arendt and Kant on evil and responsibility
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Author | Javier Burdman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885116640725 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Political Theory
2019, Vol. 18(2) 174–194
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116640725
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Article
Between banality and
radicality: Arendt and Kant
on evil and responsibility
Javier Burdman
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL, USA
Abstract
The paper reads Kant’s notion of radical evil as anticipating and clarifying problematic
aspects of what Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. By reconstructing Arendt’s varied
analyses of this notion throughout her later writings, I show that the main theoretical
challenge posed by it concerns the adjudication of responsibility for evil deeds that seem
to lack recognisable evil intentions. In order to clarify this issue, I turn to a canonical
text in which the relationship between evil and responsibility plays a central role: Kant’s
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Relying on an interpretation of this writing
by Arendt’s mentor Karl Jaspers published in 1935, in evident connection to National
Socialism, I challenge Arendt’s own interpretation of Kant’s notion of radical evil, which,
I argue, represents an antecedent, rather than a contrast, to ‘the banality of evil’. For
Kant, radical evil consists in the destruction of the person’s sense of responsibility, thus
producing a self-exculpatory mentality such as the one that characterised Eichmann
during his trial.
Keywords
Arendt, Kant, evil, responsibility, Eichmann
Introduction
The publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem brought the problem
of evil into debates within political theory. After a negative reaction to what many
interpreted as an exculpatory account of Eichmann’s involvement in the Final
Solution, scholars from multiple fields have sought to unpack the complexities
contained in Arendt’s polemical notion of ‘the banality of evil’. Recently, the
topic found its way into public debates due to Margarethe von Trotta’s film
Corresponding author:
Javier Burdman, Department of Political Science, Scott Hall, 601 University Pl, Northwestern University,
Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Email: jaburdman@gmail.com
Hannah Arendt and the newspaper articles that followed it.
1
With few exceptions,
however, scholars have not further pursued Arendt’s central concern in her later
writings, namely, to understand what is novel about totalitarian evil in relation to
the forms of evil conceptualised throughout the Western philosophical, religious,
and political tradition of thought.
2
For Arendt, ‘the banality of evil’ was not a fully
worked out concept, but rather a descriptive term in need of conceptualisation. As
she put it in The Life of the Mind: ‘after having been struck by a fact that, willy-
nilly, ‘‘put me in possession of a concept’’ (the banality of evil) I could not help
raising the quaestio juris and asking myself ‘‘by what right I possessed and used
it’’.
3
Addressing this ‘quaestio juris’, that is, the theoretical underpinnings under-
lying the use of the concept concerns not only our understanding of evil in the
contemporary world but also of moral and political action more broadly. Indeed,
as Arendt claims in an early essay, the systematic mass murder performed by
National Socialism ‘strains not only the imagination of human beings, but also
the framework and categories of our political thought and action’.
4
This essay argues that some of the conceptual difficulties contained in Arendt’s
notion of ‘the banality of evil’ can be clarified by reading it in dialogue with its
main theoretical antecedent, namely, Kant’s notion of ‘radical evil’. Such dialogue
was opened up by Arendt herself, whose varied remarks on totalitarian evil
throughout her work often include references to Kant. However, I will show
that Arendt overlooked important elements in Kant’s account of evil in his later
writings. A close reading of Kant’s analysis of radical evil, together with a recon-
struction of the development of the problem of evil in his practical philosophy, will
show that the notion of ‘radical evil’ does not stand in contrast to ‘the banality of
evil’, as Arendt believed, but rather anticipates important aspects of it. In particu-
lar, I will argue that Kant’s insight clarifies the problematic status of responsibility
for evil deeds that appear to lack evil intentions, which is at the heart of Arendt’s
concern in Eichmann in Jerusalem and later writings. By focusing on the link
between evil and responsibility, I will show that Kant’s understanding of evil as
‘radical’ does not contradict the idea that it may also be ‘banal’. On the contrary,
Kant suggests that the fact that evil-doing stems from a free choice, which makes it
‘radical’, goes together with a concealment of such choice, which makes it ‘banal’,
in Arendt’s terms.
The link between Arendt’s ‘the banality of evil’ and Kant’s ‘radical evil’ has not
only a theoretical justification but also a historical one. The idea that, contrary to
Arendt’s original reflections on the topic, totalitarian evil must be confronted in its
‘total banality’, was originally suggested to her by Karl Jaspers in a letter from
1946.
5
In 1935, almost two years after Hitler’s coming to power, Jaspers had pub-
lished an essay on Kant’s ‘radical evil’ and its importance for a critical understand-
ing of modernity. Although Kant is not explicitly mentioned in Jaspers’s letter to
Arendt, it is evident that its main point, which is that Nazi crimes are not ‘demonic’
but ‘banal’, is strongly influenced by Kant’s analysis of radical evil. Arendt imme-
diately acknowledged the pertinence of Jaspers’s perspective, as evidenced by her
response letter.
6
Most significantly, however, she borrowed his term for the subtitle
of her book on Eichmann, in which her agreement with Jaspers seemingly became
Burdman 175
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