Why Detective novels:
Hannah Arendt is writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, not as a philosopher, but as an investigative reporter. At several points in the book, she repeats she is writing “a report” and that her task is to report on the facts.
Of course, Arendt is also having some fun with her writing, using an ironic tone and comparing various versions of stories and comparing conflicting accounts of events that happened in 1937…or was it in 1938! I get the sense that for her, reporting the facts is also about playing detective.
Like Detective Joe Friday from the TV Show Dragnet: “Just the Facts”.
In a biography of Arendt I recently read, I was delighted to find out that she read detective novels. In several accounts, Arendt would go on vacation reading Hegel and Agatha Christie or George Simenon.
But I think there is actually something more signifiant about the relationship of her voice in the book and to the detective character or genre. Arendt philosophical work is about “THINKING”, as a human activity, and, as a political activity. The action of the detective novel is also “thinking”: the thoughts of the detective and their ability to piece together bits of information into whole story. For Arendt, the human activity of thinking involved taking the data and phenomena of our lives, the facts, and crafting them into a story (Mythos). To apply this thinking to the web of human relations was also the political work of a philosopher or theorist.
Arendt’s diagnosis of Adolf Eichmann was that he "had “lost his ability to think”. If Arendt sincerely believes that thinking is the antidote to fascism, then why can’t the detective be the hero of democratic society.