Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When Eich­mann in Jerusalem—Han­nah Arendt’s book about Nazi offi­cer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it con­tributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the dis­course, the “banal­i­ty of evil.” And the con­cept at first caused a crit­i­cal furor. “Enor­mous con­tro­ver­sy cen­tered on what Arendt had writ­ten about the con­duct of the tri­al, her depic­tion of Eich­mann, and her dis­cus­sion of the role of the Jew­ish Coun­cils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dis­sent mag­a­zine, “Eich­mann, she claimed, was not a ‘mon­ster’; instead, she sus­pect­ed, he was a ‘clown.’”

Arendt blamed vic­tims who were forced to col­lab­o­rate, crit­ics charged, and made the Nazi offi­cer seem ordi­nary and unre­mark­able, reliev­ing him of the extreme moral weight of his respon­si­bil­i­ty. She answered these charges in an essay titled “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship,” pub­lished in 1964. Here, she aims to clar­i­fy the ques­tion in her title by argu­ing that if Eich­mann were allowed to rep­re­sent a mon­strous and inhu­man sys­tem, rather than shock­ing­ly ordi­nary human beings, his con­vic­tion would make him a scape­goat and let oth­ers off the hook. Instead, she believes that every­one who worked for the regime, what­ev­er their motives, is com­plic­it and moral­ly cul­pa­ble.

But although most peo­ple are cul­pa­ble of great moral crimes, those who col­lab­o­rat­ed were not, in fact, crim­i­nals. On the con­trary, they chose to fol­low the rules in a demon­stra­bly crim­i­nal regime. It’s a nuance that becomes a stark moral chal­lenge. Arendt points out that every­one who served the regime agreed to degrees of vio­lence when they had oth­er options, even if those might be fatal. Quot­ing Mary McCarthy, she writes, “If some­body points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempt­ing you, that is all.”

While this cir­cum­stance may pro­vide a “legal excuse,” for killing, Arendt seeks to define a “moral issue,” a Socrat­ic prin­ci­ple she had “tak­en for grant­ed” that we all believed: “It is bet­ter to suf­fer than do wrong,” even when doing wrong is the law. Peo­ple like Eich­mann were not crim­i­nals and psy­chopaths, Arendt argued, but rule-fol­low­ers pro­tect­ed by social priv­i­lege. “It was pre­cise­ly the mem­bers of respectable soci­ety,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intel­lec­tu­al and moral upheaval in the ear­ly stages of the Nazi peri­od, who were the first to yield. They sim­ply exchanged one sys­tem of val­ues against anoth­er,” with­out reflect­ing on the moral­i­ty of the entire new sys­tem.

Those who refused, on the oth­er hand, who even “chose to die,” rather than kill, did not have “high­ly devel­oped intel­li­gence or sophis­ti­ca­tion in moral mat­ters.” But they were crit­i­cal thinkers prac­tic­ing what Socrates called a “silent dia­logue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with them­selves after com­mit­ting or enabling atroc­i­ties. We must remem­ber, Arendt writes, that “what­ev­er else hap­pens, as long as we live we shall have to live togeth­er with our­selves.”

Such refusals to par­tic­i­pate might be small and pri­vate and seem­ing­ly inef­fec­tu­al, but in large enough num­bers, they would mat­ter. “All gov­ern­ments,” Arendt writes, quot­ing James Madi­son, “rest on con­sent,” rather than abject obe­di­ence. With­out the con­sent of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate employ­ees, the “leader… would be help­less.” Arendt admits the unlike­ly effec­tive­ness of active oppo­si­tion to a one-par­ty author­i­tar­i­an state. And yet when peo­ple feel most pow­er­less, most under duress, she writes, an hon­est “admis­sion of one’s own impo­tence” can give us “a last rem­nant of strength” to refuse.

We have only for a moment to imag­ine what would hap­pen to any of these forms of gov­ern­ment if enough peo­ple would act “irre­spon­si­bly” and refuse sup­port, even with­out active resis­tance and rebel­lion, to see how effec­tive a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many vari­a­tions of non­vi­o­lent action and resistance—for instance the pow­er that is poten­tial in civ­il dis­obe­di­ence.

We have exam­ple after exam­ple of these kinds of refusals to par­tic­i­pate in a mur­der­ous sys­tem or fur­ther its aims. Arendt was aware these actions can come at great cost. The alter­na­tives, she argues, may be far worse.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.