In 2013, writing about "The Banality of Systemic Evil" on The New York Times Opinionator blog, Peter Ludlow made the observation that Hannah Arendt was making "a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing -- or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences."
It's an observation that seems eerily prescient, and one that makes me suspect Hannah Arendt got a bad rap when what she was trying to do was simply make people think about some of the most urgent issues of the times in which we live.
(Cross-posted with Daily Kos)
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