Abstract

The topic of evil has a central place in Hannah Arendt’s thinking as it lies at the core of all her trains of thought. We analyze the „nature of evil“ in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy through the study of her work and of her life experience, especially when she covered the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem where she pointed out that Eichmann represented „the banality of evil“. Our goal in this contribution is to understand whether the philosophy of Voltaire could have influenced Arendt’s conception of evil, why it arises, why it persists throughout history, and whether it can be destroyed.