Hannah Arendt spent much of her life and a great deal of her writing in an effort to comprehend the destructive forces of the twentieth century, some of which, as she never ceased to remind us, were fundamentally unprecedented and incomprehensible in any ordinary or conventional sense. Within the domain of the social sciences, Arendt argued, there are data which “respond to our commonly accepted research techniques and scientific concepts,” and then there are data “which explode this whole framework of reference” and defy our categories of explanation concerning human social and individual behavior. In the face of such data, Arendt noted, “we can only guess in what forms human life is being lived when it is lived as though it took place on another planet.”

Arendt thought that the line between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, between human life on earth and some other planet, between human evil and absolute evil, was crossed in the final stages of totalitarianism when Nazi anti-semitism transmogrified into the Holocaust, as anti-Jewish legislation, the herding of Jews into European ghettos, and the establishment of forced labor camps, mutated into the creation of death factories for “the fabrication of corpses” undergirded by a methodical and mechanized program for the extermination and annihilation of human beings.