On the other hand, contrary to what Abel says, Miss Arendt never presents him as a “dutiful clerk”; his work was important, indeed crucial, in the Nazi scheme, and he could feel that he, as an individual, was making a significant contribution to the Fuehrer’s task. He may or may not have conceived of himself as irreplaceable; if he did this was one of his delusions—a delusion no doubt shared by other Nazi functionaries, each of whom, on the lower levels, was replaceable while all of them together were not. Eichmann was free to quit his desk and his “great responsibilities” at any time, as Miss Arendt shows; no one forced him to do this particular work. Yet his staying on the job and the zeal he brought to it do not prove that he liked killing Jews, even at a distance. He liked being a functionary and “necessary,” and if this entailed a certain amount of self-sacrifice he liked it even more, for he saw it in the preliminary terms Kant laid down in formulating the categorical imperative: that a virtuous action is one done against inclination. That an act done against inclination is therefore virtuous was Eichmann’s mistaken understanding or perhaps his rationalization. As Miss Arendt sums up in a terrible flash of insight, “Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.” In this passage, it seems to me, rereading her book, Miss Arendt’s scorn and contempt for Eichmann were mingled with a kind of pained, wry-mouthed pity. Eichmann at this time—it was at the end of the war—was pressing for the continuation of the extermination policy, in obedience to the supreme “law” of the Fuehrer’s will, long after many of his colleagues and superiors had seen the end coming and were seeking to save their skins by “saving” Jews. What she pities in Eichmann (if I do not misread her) is the extent to which he could go on doing evil when all careerist motives had disappeared and against his personal desires—to have stopped the transports to Auschwitz, in his blinkered view, would have been to yield to a temptation. If Abel wants a dramatic parallel for Eichmann, he ought to open his Ibsen. There he can find “idealists” as pernickety, as literal-minded, and nearly as dangerous to humanity. Like the simpletons in Ibsen who talk of the “demands of the ideal,” Eichmann was a fool, and what is pitiable in the Eichmann Miss Arendt sees is his foolish consistency, the way in which his inner mechanism, his “soul,” continued to tick like some trusty middle-class alarm clock, unaware that it had become an infernal machine and listening only to the sound of its own reliability, signifying that everything was normal.