ABSTRACT
So if we want to grasp what Arendt means by 'radical evil', then we must try to understand what she means by 'making human beings as human beings superfluous'. It is clear already how she begins to depart from Kant because she does not think that radical evil has anything to do with the vice of selfishness or what Kant calls 'self-love'. Indeed she makes a much stronger claim that radical evil has nothing to do with humanly understandable, sinful motives. It is not simply a matter of treating human beings as means to an end or denying their intrinsic dignity. A close reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism shows the pervasiveness of the theme of superfluousness. And it takes a variety of forms. Arendt was sensitive to the fact the major political events of the Twentieth century, from the First World War on, have created millions of people who are not only homeless and stateless but are treated as if they were completely superfluous and dispensable. And she also calls attention to that feature of totalitarian ideology in which the alleged 'universal' laws of Nature and History transcend all individual human aspirations and desires so that human individuals qua individuals become dispensable and superfluous to the dynamic quality of a totalitarian movement. It is in this sense that the manipulators of a totalitarian system are most dangerous because they not only believe in the superfluousness of their victims, but even in their own superfluousness because it is surpassed by the Movement. But the deepest and most shocking sense of superfluousness is revealed in the concentration camps that are the 'laboratories' of totalitarianism. For it is in these laboratories where changes in human nature are tested. It is the phenomenon of the concentration camps, more than any other aspect of totalitarianism that defies human comprehension. The horror of the concentration and extermination camps can never be fully embraced by the imagination, for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death' (1948, p.748). Any appeal to common sense, utilitarian categories, or 'liberal rationalisations' breaks down when confronted with the phenomenon of the death camps. In her brilliant analysis of the 'logic' of
total domination, Arendt distinguishes three stages. 'The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man' (1968, p.447). This was started long before the Nazis established the concentration camps. Arendt is referring to the 'legal' restrictions that stripped Jews (and other marginalised groups) of all their juridical rights. The highly effective way in which these juridical restrictions were enacted has been graphically recorded in that remarkable document, the diaries of Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness. Arendt tells: 'The aim of an arbitrary system is to destroy the civil rights of the whole population, who ultimately become just as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and homeless. The destruction of man's rights, the killing of the juridical person in him, is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely' (1968, p.451). In the concentration camps, there isn't even the pretence of human rights inmates having any rights.
