Litbrit quoted Hannah Arendt by way of Driftglass yesterday. Among the many celebrated essays Arendt wrote, a catch-phrase from one of them has become most famous: "the banality of evil."
Today, Chris Hedges quotes a different Arendt work, though one with essentially the same message:
“Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1945 essay 'Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,' “it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.”
