Collective violence and obedience to authority

In a new article, DIIS researcher Johannes Lang explores the concept of obedience in social-psychological explanations of mass atrocity. Political theorist Hannah Arendt’s phrase about “the banality of evil” and psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience inspired the influential view that perpetrators of mass atrocity are completely ordinary people who simply do their duty without asking critical questions. Yet this explanation originated in a selective reading of Arendt that distorted her account. In fact, Arendt explicitly rejected the concept of obedience in political affairs.

So is it possible that Milgram and his many followers have fundamentally misunderstood Arendt? Lang’s article turns Arendt against Milgram, using her thought to analyze the complexities of obedience. At stake is the notion of personal responsibility for collective violence, as well as the social sciences’ ability to say something meaningful about the history of mass atrocity.

The article appears in Theory & Psychology 24, no. 5 (requires password)