Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil," developed through her analysis of a Third Reich bureaucrat responsible for organizing mass deportations, describes how atrocity can be perpetrated not by ideologically driven hatred but by unreflective careerism and unquestioning obedience to authority within an illegitimate legal order—evil enacted through thoughtlessness rather than malice. This case functions in political theory as a paradigmatic problem for the foundational question of political legitimacy: whether a regime's laws impose genuine obligations of obedience, and whether resistance to or prosecution outside an existing legal/jurisdictional order can itself be justified, raising the further question of what distinguishes a legitimate from an illegitimate political order.
Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil," developed through her analysis of a Third Reich bureaucrat responsible for organizing mass deportations, describes how atrocity can be perpetrated n…