ABSTRACT
In this very influential book, Arendt adapts her academic political philosophy to a more popular audience as she covers the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He was a joiner who hid behind official cliches and euphemisms. This notion of evil as ignorance and banality follows Arendt's doctoral dissertation on Augustine's On the Free Choice of the Will under Karl Jaspers. If Arendt is correct in her assessment, then the possibility of another Holocaust is real and requires our constant vigilance to prevent. Eichmann's astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systematic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. Eichmann's account during the police examination of how he was introduced into the new department—distorted, of course, but not wholly devoid of truth—oddly recalls this fool's paradise.
