Contribution

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of articles written for the New Yorker, was published in 1963. An account of the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, it was also a contribution to the early historiography and interpretation of the Holocaust. Above all, Arendt sought to respond to the problem of unprecedented crimes against humanity, and to offer a diagnosis of the dangers posed by the bureaucratic personality in modernity. A meeting point between philosophy and journalism, the text defined the voice, role and task of the public intellectual, and was a declaration of affiliations for a thinker in exile, addressing the legacies of the past from which her own theoretical preoccupations emerged.

The gathering explores the legacy of Arendt’s essay: its status as exemplar for philosophical intervention in the world, its style of dealing with the unthinkable, and its relationship to ongoing controversies in historiography and jurisprudence.