Let's face it, Arendt hated Hausner because he was an "uppety Austjuden," and not a German Jew as god intended that all good intellectuals should be.

The fact that Irving Howe, Llionel Abel and other went on the offensive showed that they understood were Arendt was coming from. 

Arendt's thesis, btw, has been shown to be wrong.

Saul Bellow in Sammler's Planet has a devastating critique of Arendt's thesis. Too bad the article didn't mention either that great author or his novel.

"Arendt's thesis, btw, has been shown to be wrong."

Oh, come on, Jackson. Which thesis is that? That horrors can be orchestrated by pedestrian men with prosaic motivations? Or that the Judenrats in many cases facilitated the mass murder of their own people? I'll leave it to others to decide whether either of these theses are "disgusting"; regardless, they're both true, neither has been falsified.

"regardless, they're both true, neither has been falsified."

 The former does not follow from the latter.

That's true. But the former is consistent with the latter. And vice versa. Or perhaps this: if the dispassionate reader accepts that the latter is true, he should recognize that this increases the probability that the former is true.

To be fair, though, I'm so certain that the former is true, that I really don't even think about the latter.

Yes, it is consistent in the sense that lack of falsification is a necessary condition for something to be true. However, it is not a sufficient condition. A necessary condition is also not a guarantee of increased probability.

For example, the existence of the color black is necessary to create a black perpetual motion machine. Clearly, the color black exists. Just as clearly, the probability of making a black perpetual motion machine remains firmly planted at 0%.

I think the strongest critiques of Arendt's thesis have criticized the invention of totalitarianism, particularly that totalitarianism glosses over glaring differences in the regimes it unifies. The "Banality of Evil" uneasily rests upon this flawed foundation of totalitarianism.

For several reasons, I don't think the relationship of "black" to "black perpetual motion machine" is comparable to the relationship between "never been falsified" and "true". However, if either of us says one more word on the topic, I will probably have to disembowel myself.

Yes, Arendt has been criticized for using "totalitarianism" as way to service the Cold War West by drawing specious and/or excessive parallels between Communism and fascism. (The Origins of Totalitarianism and so forth). But though it's been a few years since I read Eichmann in Jerusalem, I don't remember anything significant in that book that depended upon her theories of totalitarianism. Arendt was a scholar of assload breadth, and the banality of evil and the complicity of the Judenrats stand independently of her theories of totalitarianism.

London

October 20, 2007

Dear Mr Weiss,

Thank you for linking approvingly to my article about the responses to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. I would like to respond to Jackson Dyer's point as to why I did not mention Saul Bellow's Mr.Sammler's Planet. The reason is quite simple - that book was not published until 1970, four or more years after the main controversy had died down. My article focussed on the reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem from the appearance of the articles in The New Yorker prior to the book being published up to the point of the reviews of Jacob Robinson's book length critique And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight. This was the period when the debate was at its peak. There have of course been numerous subsequent reviews of which Bellow's novel is but one. Had I had the space, I would have commented on that book and notably used Bellow's description of banality via his character Mr. Sammler as "the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience." In the editorial process, some of the reviews of Arendt's book that I discussed were cut. For those interested, I certainly recommend the critical review that was published by the Anti Defamation League in its journal Facts in the July-August 1963 issue. The article, "A Report on the Evil of Banality: The Arendt Book" was unsigned but based on Jacob Robinson's work. It was one of the first detailed critical responses and it is widely accepted and acknowledged that many of the literary critics that wrote hostile reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem used information provided by Robinson for advice.

Yours sincerely

Michael Ezra