Hannah Arendt's conceptualizations of evil
Author(s)
Advisor
Date
2016-01Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
We owe to Hannah Arendt the notion of “radical evil” and “the banality of evil”. The
word “evil” appears with a surprising frequency in Arendt’s work, even though she never
wrote a theory of evil and she was not a moralist. Arendt was not a systematic thinker. In
this thesis I reconstruct Hannah Arendt’s accounts of evil by presenting them in relation
to other fundamental concepts for which Arendt is well-known. My argument is that in
order to understand the many nuances of the concept of evil that feature in Hannah
Arendt’s body of work we need to look at the relation between evil and freedom. As
Arendt’s two notions of freedom (I-can of the new beginning and I-will of the freedom
of will) point towards two different conceptualizations of evil (radicality of evil and the
banality of evil), it is the reality of evil which serves as the linchpin that helps us see the
relation that exists between these two conceptualizations.