In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt attributes the criminal mind of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann to a “sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity…” A Report on the Banality of Evil , which is the book’s subtitle, introduces a kind of evil - the worst conceivable kind in human history - that departs from the “radical evil” that is at the heart of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Shortly after the publication of Eichmann , Arendt wrote to philosopher Gershom Scholem: […] I changed my opinion and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” […] It is indeed my opinion now that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension […] It is “thought-defying”, as I sai...