Totalitarianism and the problem of evil

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism is central to her subsequent arguments for natality, plurality, and freedom. Moreover, her reflections on social conformity, the alliance between the mob and the elite, the social experience of loneliness, and the superfluousness of individuals are pertinent to the contemporary rise of illiberal democracy and political extremism. Arendt underscores how the normalisation of refusing to think about what we are doing leads to administrative processes of dehumanisation, where everything is not only permitted but possible. If totalitarianism revealed the radical nature of evil in The Origins of Totalitarianism , she argued for its banality in Eichmann in Jerusalem . This chapter argues that policies of dehumanisation that define certain human beings as unnecessary and superfluous demonstrate how evil can be both radical and banal.