ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to delineate Hannah Arendt's philosophy of diversity by connecting her ideas about thinking with her analysis of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the chapter Arendt discusses criminal guilt but she does not refrain from engaging with larger philosophical issues. Arendt's approach is highly idiosyncratic: she associates the very Christian notion of reconciliation not with Christianity but with Judaism. According to Arendt, the Jewish notion of reconciliation stipulates human beings who act and sometimes act unjustly, but it does not posit a poisoned humanity. The incapacity for judgment was no idiosyncratic glitch in Eichmann's personality but an inherent potential within the moral structure of modern life itself. Significantly, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt sets out to understand someone who is incapable of understanding and thus hostile to human plurality.
