Abstract
Hannah Arendt, in a letter to Gerschom Scholem, claims that now she has published her work Eichmann in Jerusalem she abandoned the concept of radical evil and came to the conclusion that evil has no depth or demonic dimension. Tis study analyses her understanding of radical evil in Te Origins of Totalitarianism as well as the concept of the banality of evil in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and poses the question of whether Arendt's thinking about evil marks a discontinuity, as not only the author herself asserts, but also some commentators (D.
Villa), or whether the core of her thought on evil has not in any way altered and only points of emphasis are different (R. Bernstein).
Arendt has reasons for her rejection of the concept of radical evil, which are connected with her opening assumption that evil is always merely shallow and banal, and that it cannot be overcome even dialectically. Tis thesis is not, however, new, and evidence of it can be found not only in Te Origins of Totalitarianism but also in the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers from the 1940s.
Te aim of this study is to show that the shift from the concept of radical evil to banal evil is a change in points of emphasis, rather than a change in the content of the concept, even if the points emphasized were already present in the earlier work of this important philosopher