Fifty years ago this week, on 14 August 1961, the world witnessed the end of the trial of Adolf Otto Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. Writing about his subsequent execution in the final chapter of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics), the philosopher Hannah Arendt coined a timeless phrase:
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil
When we recently asked you to nominate intellectual cliches to examine in this series, "the banality of evil" came up repeatedly (props to bigOther, Eglantine and janeinalberta).
In the second series of The Big Ideas, we will therefore look at what Arendt really said, why it became such a popular phrase, and whether it can still help us to understand evil in the world today. Benjamen Walker talks to Arendt's biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Alex Haslam, professor of social psychology at Exeter University, and the Guardian's foreign leader writer David Hearst.
With special thanks to Richard Green at BBC Radio Devon
