The cliché as the ground of political philosophy
4 min readOct 3, 2018
Hannah Arendt’s reporting on the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann famously ends with the summation that what she observed was the banality of evil. She presents Eichmann, the mid-level manager whose obsession with organization made mass murder possible, as someone for whom the cliché was a sedative of conscience, for whom propaganda took on moral authority.