ABSTRACT
In the 40 years since her death, Hannah Arendt remains a major figure in Western political thought. And her report on the Eichmann trial and reflections on thoughtless evil remain the subject of intense debate and have inspired scholarship in areas such as climate change, refugee policy and the status of whistleblowers. In the decades since Arendt's death, her emphasis on fostering a habit of thinking and identifying what is unprecedented. This chapter focuses on Arendt's analysis of thoughtlessness and a warning she issued toward the end of her report on the Eichmann trial about the re-emergence of totalitarianism in the future. Drawing on Arendt's warning, it draws on Sheldon Wolin and Wendy Brown to argue that corporate dominance in western democracies has given rise to an inverted totalitarianism where human subjects are constituted as homo oeconomicus and are unfree in novel ways.
