Hannah Arendt was a political theorist (1906-1975), whose book 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' (1951) and essays such as 'Truth and Politics' (1967) are introduced as 'urgently' relevant to our times - with a recent spike of interest in her work, now translated into dozens of languages.

While covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil", she claimed that Eichmann was not an evil sociopath but an very average person who was not driven by ideology but was rather motivated by professional promotion. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were normal but that they were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was very unexceptional in bureaucracy and in political and public institutions where critical thinking is not encouraged in the workforce.