DOES THINKING prevent evil? Can critical self-reflection protect a person from participating in evil, particularly in a totalitarian regime? The distinguished political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) thought so. Her famous 1963 case study Eichmann in Jerusalem advanced the thesis that Adolf Eichmann's inability to think--his extraordinary shallowness--led him blindly to pursue evil. His supervision of genocide could not be attributed to great vice, to culpable passions, to the ...
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