ABSTRACT
Psychological and other explanations of Nazi crimes are quite unsatistactory, as Arendt rightly remarks. Arendt’s only really well-written book in English is Eichmann in Jerusalem, and one surmises that the difference is due to the discipline imposed by the circumstances of its writing - it was originally commissioned as a series of articles for The New Yorker and might reflect some editorial interference. Perhaps Arendt’s account is influenced by anti-essentialist leanings. Anti-essentialism is a commonplace dogma of much twentieth-century European philosophy. The criminals, on the other hand, were mostly ordinary, even commonplace. Adolf Eichmann, she claims, was a monster, a freak, a madman; he was an uneducated and rather stupid creature, clownish, illogical and boastful.
