This statement is especially revealing for understanding Hannah Arendt as an independent thinker. We know that many of the incidents that provoked her thinking were directly related to her attempt to comprehend what seemed so outrageous and unprecedented – the novel event of twentieth-century totalitarianism, especially Nazi totalitarianism. In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, she declares: “And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.” In 1945, she had already said that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Few postwar intellectuals directly confronted the problem of evil, but it did become fundamental for Hannah Arendt. She returned to it over and over again, and she was still struggling with it at the time of her death.

But if we take seriously the opening quotation from Arendt, we have to ask whether her reflections on evil are still relevant in our attempts to understand a very different world. We may be living through dark times, but we are not living through the type of totalitarianism that Arendt experienced. I will argue, however, that Arendt's reflections about evil do have contemporary relevance, and they can serve as a corrective to some of the current careless ways of speaking about evil.