Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil has always been Hannah Arendt's most misunderstood work. Rather than address the generalized complaints and misunderstandings, I would rather focus on her use of a term describing, on her view, a fairly new phenomenon, namely mass murder by government bureaucracy.
The "postscript" bulges with challenges to past and present political philosophy. Arendt plays with the concept of "administrative massacres", which never gained much traction in the academic discourse (though ICC die-hards use the term frequently).
For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point is not fully adequate, for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity, and the centuries of colonization and imperialism provide plenty of examples of more or less successful attempts of that sort. The expression "administrative massacres" seems better to fill the bill. The term arose in connection with British imperialism; the English deliberately rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India. The phrase has the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts can be committed only against a foreign nation or a different race. There is the well-known fact that Hitler began his mass murders by granting "mercy deaths" to the "incurably ill".
One of Eichmann's dashed hopes lay in use of the Nuremberg defense, which says defendant is not responsible for crimes committed while "only following orders".Fortunately, the Allies saw this coming and prepared the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal with this very defense in mind. According to the London Charter, only the crimes of losers (i.e. the Axis powers) could be tried. Three categories of crimes were elucidated: war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. Official position could not provide a valid defense against war crimes and obedience to orders could only be considered with an eye to mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal thought justice required it.
Essentially, Eichmann was legally damned either way. He couldn't escape culpability by claiming to have just followed orders, and he couldn't escape guilt by claiming to be part of the cog, which would have gone on with or without his assistance. In Eichmann's case, he never pulled the gas switches-- he just thought and charted out Hitler's goals. He was an opportunistic cog-- proud to be part of the political elite (thought he always considered himself low on the political hierarchy). And, as an opportunistic cog, he benefitted greatly from the spoils of modern technology and the rise of adminstrative sciences, which made plotting and planning easier than ever before by soldifying a division of labor and resolving coordination problems. Arendt puts this skillfully:
In its judgement the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But insofar as it remains a crime-- and that, of course, is the premise for a trial-- all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.
Arendt has little patience for the cog excuse, also construed as the excuse assuming statistics-- "if I had not done it, someone else would have done it". Of course, in such a scenario, it would be somebody else being punished, as opposed to you. On the other hand, Arendt realized early on the totalitarian-friendly elements of modern political bureaucracy, and spared little harsh criticism on this subject:
Of course it is important to the political and social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the political form known as bureau-cracy truly is.
For Arendt, justice is a matter of judgement-- a concept that she continues to court in her later work. As a strong advocate of free speech and public discourse to formulate tools for judgement, she certainly enriched her politicial philosophy with the questions posed by the Eichmann trial. Ultimately, it is not remarkable that evil exists-- it is only remarkable that it so frequently resembles a successful, polite, family-oriented, platitude-laden bureaucrat.
- For fans of legal theory, the Nizkor Project makes the entire judgement from Eichmann's trial available online, including the legal analyses of the judges.
- Doug Linder provides the a good summary of the political and economic context behind the London Charter planning.
- An attorney for one of tne of the US army personnel implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal tried to resuscitate the Nuremberg defense with respect to Abu Ghraib.
- Patrick F. McDevitt tries to decide if soldiers have a duty to disobey orders, only to end by making a strong case for why the US government will prefer to protect the "order" of army life over the prospect of advancing human rights.
- William F. Buckley discusses the procedural and moral tensions at Nuremberg with Margaret Warner.