What I find, perhaps, the most haunting criticism of Hannah Arendt's compelling characterization of evil within modernity is the charge that, Arendt having mostly observed the trial of Eichmann before he is to testify, the philosophical writer was not present to witness the more forceful aspects of his personality, exhibited during his defense.
For one, in reading parts of the transcripts, Eichmann's attempts to mystify his own accountability by drawing such an elaborate, labyrinthine picture of Nazi bureaucracy might easily be construed as an active strategy of a lively, even megalomaniacal mind engaged in the business of the will and survival (Nazi themes). This would hardly suit the portrait of the blase spirit of bureaucratic automaton giving platitudes after the defeat of his leaders. Even his deference to superiors in the immediate courtroom has a manipulative aspect.
That is not a criticism of Arendt's basic premise: but a way of reading this *accepted* account (accepted at least in the post-war West) that draws her themes in a sharper, more critical relief. This is, after all, one of the few completely secular accounts of the existence of evil, outside of theology, or at least outside of a theology with an active, living God.
One should not forget that the Holocaust was the first fully globally visible attempt, on the part of a fully technologically modernized state, to bring all the instruments of bureaucratic rationalization and scientific advance to bear upon the systematic extermination of a peoples. In that, that it happened, does not subtract from the violence and atrocities committed and currently being committed on other human populations.
Most of Eichmann in Jerusalem (with a page irritatingly withdrawn here or there) is available online at google books.
The transcripts from Eichmann's trials are available in full online.
Original articles Arendt wrote for the New Yorker, covering the Eichmann trial: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five are available from the New Yorker's archives.
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