As the intellectual historian Richard Wolin has explained, several recent works have firmly discredited Hannah Arendt’s famous (and notorious) Eichmann in Jerusalem and its depiction of one of the major organizers of the Holocaust as a “banal” and mindless bureaucrat, motivated more by the desire to follow orders than by actual anti-Semitism. But Arendt still has her defenders, to whom Wolin responds here:
If Eichmann was “banal,” then the Holocaust itself was banal. There is no avoiding the fact that these two claims are inextricably intertwined. . . . Arendt’s defenders would have us believe, counter-intuitively, that it was the mentalité of dutiful “functionaries,” rather than impassioned anti-Semites, that produced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. But the vast preponderance of available historical evidence tells a very different story.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1287/in-still-not-banal-a-response-to-seyla-benhabib/