Elizabeth Minnich

press release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Dr. Elizabeth Minnich for a reading and book signing from her latest book, The Evil of Banality.

A moral philosopher, Elizabeth began her quest to comprehend how ordinarily decent people make “extensive evils” (genocide, slavery) and “extensive good” possible when, as Hannah Arendt’s teaching assistant, she went with Arendt to defend Arendt’s controversial concept, the banality of evil.

How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil – to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.

Dr. Elizabeth Minnich is the award-winning author of Transforming Knowledge. She co-authored The Fox in The House: How Privatization Threatens Democracy with Si Kahn, and has published op eds as well as papers in anthologies, magazines, journals, and textbooks.