For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidi…Evil may indeed often be the most banal Eichmann. Perhaps sometimes it comes instead with Mephistophelean splendour. But very often it’s a party-goer;
boisterous; braying; a frat alumnus; a bully who loves being a bully; a successful profe…
Adolf Eichmann
historical · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Eichmann appears primarily through Hannah Arendt's thesis on the "banality of evil," which the course readings use to interrogate how bureaucratic systems—the procedural, depersonalized machinery of administration—can enable atrocity without requiring exceptional malice or ideology. The course seems to invoke Eichmann as a cautionary figure for understanding how rationalized, incremental decision-making in algorithmic and institutional systems might reproduce harm at scale, particularly relevant to questions of accountability in AI and automated governance. However, Eichmann is cited only as a historical reference point rather than a primary theoretical subject, functioning mainly to complicate simplistic narratives about evil's origins.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.