Hannah Arendt

Milgram and the Banality of Evil : Controversies of the Conformity Experiment The subject of this essay concerns the Conformity Experiment, also known as the Obedience to Authority Experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961. He started studying this phenomenon in order to understand the behaviour of individuals subject to authority, after Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, declared during the trial held in Jerusalem, that he was just carrying out Hitler's orders…

Canada, University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford. He had become a naturalized citizen of Canada, and had a passion for analyzing the Soviet Union. He had written three books, Class Cleansing being the most illustrious, receiving the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from the Heinrich Boell Foundation.…

In this poem Kipling writes, “Freedom for ourselves and freedom for our sons/ And, failing freedom, war” (19-20). This, according to Said, unveils the real Orientalist’s (White Man’s) intention and shows that beyond his angelic-like mission “there is always the express willingness to use force, to kill and be killed” (Said 226). Orwell, in his first paragraph of his essay about Kipling, argues that no one should agree with Kipling’s ideology toward imperialism or even exonerate him as he is…

any academic field, from the Nuremberg Trials, where witness testimony was minimal, until the 1990s scholars kept themselves at a distance from the events, rather, linking the Shoah to other European contexts . Historians of the 1970s such as Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich shaped the totalitarian school of thought, yet by the 1980s historiography saw itself centralising around decision making structures of the Nazi regime, and characterised by the intentionalist versus functionalist debates.…

Everybody lies, and that is not a surprise. Lie transformed in an integral part of a human life long ago. Moreover, according to Brandon Gaille, people lie an average 4 times a day or 1460 times a year. Reasons for that are different: to get an advantage, to present oneself in the most favorable light, to protect one's dear persons from being hurt, to protect oneself from conflict situation, and so on and so forth. Those reasons justify the usage of lie, and thanks to that there are even spheres…

Auschwitz: True Stories From a Grotesque Land, she tells her story of her experiences within Auschwitz. Likewise, Primo Levi tells his story of his encounters during his time in Auschwitz in “The Gray Zone”. In her essay, “The Concentration Camps”, Hannah Arendt writes that “the next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man”. Given this, as well as Sara Nomberg’s Auschwitz: True…

Late May of 1946, all over the world people attempted to restart their lives. Millions had become displaced due to damage or causalities, the Holocaust, being drafted and many others. Tuviah Friedman for example, like many others was looking for a fresh start. With no family or home left for him in Poland due to Nazi cruelty he along with many others hoped to leave. His home in particular in Radom, Poland was overtaken by a new family after the Jews were cleared from the area. He joined the…

children 's transition from family to the adult world as smooth as it can be. Moreover, instead of helping students fit in the majority of rules, a powerful education should teach individuals how to think -- “There is no dangerous thoughts,” said Arendt, “because thinking itself is dangerous.” -- education should not only give each individual the knowledge of the common world, but also the ability for everyone to question and rebel with the common knowledge. Personally speaking, I believe that…

Kafka illustrates in TheTrial how an unaccountable and inaccessible legal system ultimately destroys the notion of justice in society. Joseph K. is helpless in the novel. He is a victim of misinformation or rather no information. He lives in a society that apparently has a distorted sense of law and order. The elements which runs the social system are corrupted. In the hand of social system of the bourgeois society Joseph K. is a victim. In the novel the court is powerful and it’s law is…

Through a psychological perspective we can analyze actions people take and determine why they acted the way they did. Experiments such as Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment shed light on the great lengths people are willing to go to for an authority figure. When his research first came out it was believed that the “banality of evil” was the cause of the subject’s behavior, however new studies suggest that people’s willingness to abide to authorities is conditional to the belief that the…