Arendt wrote: ‘The longer one listened to him, the more it became obvious that his inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’ When Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, the phrase that of all the millions of words she wrote has survived her death in 1975, it was this deficiency she was indicting. ‘Eichmann was not stupid, but rather intelligent,’ she told the historian Joachim Fest. ‘But it was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality … There’s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.’
Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, has written a sometimes infuriating yet often scintillating and always bracing book. It is in part a biography and in part a meditation on what, if anything, the long-dead philosopher has to say to us today. Stonebridge takes inspiration from the fact that when Donald Trump became president in 2016, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism got a sales bump. Clearly some thought Arendt’s dissection of Nazism could help us understand 21st-century populism’s leading monster.
Moreover, this is a book in which Stonebridge conducts a bold literary experiment. When she writes about what Arendt saw in Eichmann, she does something extraordinary – and in keeping with her heroine’s political philosophy. She puts herself in Arendt’s place and imagines how she, Stonebridge, might have regarded that putatively banal devil. Stonebridge claims justification for her method by citing how Arendt was committed to what Immanuel Kant called ‘an enlarged mentality’. Arendt told her students at New York’s New School in 1968 what that meant: ‘You think your own thoughts but in the place of somebody else.’ An enlarged mentality, though, is not the same as empathy, which involves sharing the feelings of another. Arendt didn’t do empathy. Indeed for her, just as for Kant, feelings could get in the way of proper moral judgement. Arendt was raised in the German city of Königsberg (now called Kaliningrad and part of Russia), where Kant had lived and taught. She read his Critique of Pure Reason at sixteen and emerges from Stonebridge’s pages as more marked by Kantian thought on how we should act than by anything she learned in Heidegger’s lectures or bed.