The political feature of the banality of evil

Abstract

This paper is an attempt of finding the principal characteristics and sense of innovation of the notion of banality of evil as well as of the analysis advanced by Hannah Arendt. The problem of evil is of great importance nowadays; in fact, according to Arendt, it is related to the absence of thought, or the destruction process of the individual’s personality. The text tries to explain that evilness is not only a part of human condition as goodness is, but that it is realized in the absence of thought. This problem does not have an epitestemological or an ontological feature, but it is closed to politics, since the “non-thinking” seems to be a suitable state for the absence of those inherent capacities of human life that prove people’s dignity such as liberty and spontaneity.