See Philip Hallie, “Magda and the Great Virtues”.

The phrase “banality of evil” has been so widely appropriated, reimagined, and reappropriated into new contexts that it has completely lost its original bite. Not to mention the fact that it has repeatedly been called into question; both Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s psychology and the wider application of the notion to human activity in general have been criticized. But perhaps critics are missing the essential insight of the phrase. The philosopher invents the phrase as a phenomenological description of the facts in a particular case. In so doing she calls into question the common practice of understanding atrocities as somehow transcendentally other in origin. We go out to see the monster, and find only the man. In Eichmann’s case one cannot detect “any diabolical or demonic profundity.” His participation in evil can not be said to be accidental, unintentional or even “commonplace;” but it is mundane.

Milton described a tragic rebel Satan, a being who purely refuses to serve the Good, who would storm heaven with his minions. Augustine claimed that, as a youth he stole some pears because he “loved to perish.” Freud hypothesized the existence of an inner thanatos, a drive towards death that is everywhere alloyed with our other motives. But Arendt described a mediocre functionary whose evil is contextualized by his participation in a system. Perhaps she means not to say what evil is, but only what it can be. In some cases of evil, when you open the box, nothing is there. There is no great scheme, no army of rebel angels, no dark concupiscence of the flesh, no inner impulse towards self-negation. And this is in some ways the most frightening account of evil we can imagine.