Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Loren36 (talk | contribs) at 08:39, 17 June 2006 (Reverted edits by 207.200.116.12 (talk) to last version by GTBacchus). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Banality of Evil is a phrase coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem to describe the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by very ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal and ordinary.

External links

• An overview of the concept from www.thirdworldtraveler.com
• The Banality of Evil at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Banality of Evil at the Information Clearing House

This philosophy-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Philosophy stubs
• English phrases
• Social philosophy