Against obedience: Hannah Arendt’s overlooked challenge to social-psychological explanations of mass atrocity

The fragility of conventional morality: Perpetrators as men of the mass

For Arendt, Nazism was a phenomenon of social collapse. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1967) she described how mass death during World War I and mass unemployment in the interwar years left people with a profound sense of being “superfluous” and disposable. The uprooted masses experienced intense feelings of insecurity and longed for a sense of safety, fellowship, and improved social status; people craved a leader who could provide this. The perpetrators of the Holocaust were “first and foremost job holders and good family men” (Arendt, 1951/1967, p. 338) concerned with their family’s welfare and security, as well as with their own professional success; they were motivated by “private,” not “political” concerns. And nothing, wrote Arendt, “proved easier to destroy” than the “private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives” (Arendt, 1951/1967, p. 338).

The destruction of the individual’s private, or internalized, morality began with the destruction of the public sphere. Nazi rule, in Arendt’s view, thrived on an impaired intersubjectivity, that is, on the absence of critical discourse. What would others say? Under totalitarian rule, according to Arendt, the others say nothing, for they dare not. In this atmosphere of weakened public opinion, people may easily lose their “common sense,” as Arendt put it, making it possible for the coercive logic of totalitarian ideology to prevail, according to which mass murder can become a moral duty. Eichmann did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience” because “his conscience spoke” with “the voice of respectable society around him” (Arendt, 1963, p. 126). This made it “well-nigh impossible for him,” Arendt wrote, “to know or to feel” that he was “doing wrong” (1963, p. 276). Eichmann’s conscience, Arendt speculated, may have worked in the “expected way” (1963, p. 95) for a few weeks, operating according to the moral principle of “thou shalt not kill,” but thereafter he simply and horribly began to follow the opposite principle of “thou shalt kill.” Like millions of Germans, claimed Arendt, Eichmann simply exchanged one system of values for another in order to “coordinate” his opinions and actions with the ideology of the state.

Such coordination required that Eichmann and his fellow Nazis surrender (or, at the very least, act against) their private judgment of government policies, and Arendt declared that this surrender or suppression of judgment led to a breakdown of judgment itself, resulting in unreflective perpetrators who only evaluated their actions with reference to the prevailing political order. Like so many others, Eichmann quickly came to recognize Hitler’s will as a legitimate expression of the will of the German people and adjusted to the new moral framework. Arendt concluded that his conscience amounted to no more than a wish to live up to what was expected of him as a civil servant in the Nazi system: to be effective at his job, as well as subjectively and behaviorally in harmony with the ideology and practice of the regime.

Nazi rule proved to Arendt that we cannot rely on conventional morality—a moral framework based in tradition—as a bulwark against mass atrocity; one moral framework can suddenly be replaced by another. When the Nazis changed the rules and practices of social life, Arendt purported, both individual morality and behavior changed with them.

Arendt’s account of elites manipulating gullible and opportunistic masses harmonized well with social psychology’s situationist claim that people generally strive to behave in accordance with what is normatively expected of them in any given context, and that the individual’s morality is therefore vulnerable to situational forces. Following the trial of former Auschwitz guards, Arendt was struck by how the defendants, “like almost all other Nazi criminals,” showed “a remarkable tendency to fall in line with whoever happened to constitute their surroundings—to ‘coordinate’ themselves, as it were, at a moment’s notice” (1966/2003a, p. 234). She argued like a situationist when she insisted that the origins of the guards’ obedience, in court and in camp, should be sought in the normative expectations that those contexts confronted them with, and not in their personal histories, cultural background, or ideological convictions.

Just following orders: Stanley Milgram’s social-psychological reading of Arendt

In her 1963 book on the Eichmann trial, Arendt contended that structural fragmentation and psychological compartmentalization had minimized or eliminated the perpetrators’ moral scruples and sense of responsibility through segmenting the process of mass murder into specialized tasks that could be designated to multiple individuals. This practice created technocrats who focused on the minutiae of their assignments while remaining unconcerned about the larger purpose and consequences of their actions.

In Arendt’s terminology, Eichmann was “thoughtless,” meaning that he had failed to reflect on his actions in terms other than those supplied by self-interest or Nazi ideology. He had failed to consider his actions from alternative perspectives, including those of the victims, which would have enabled a critical assessment of his behavior. The phrase “the banality of evil” described precisely this breakdown of personal judgment, causing a disjuncture between the mentality of the perpetrator, which was “banal,” and his acts, which were “evil.” Eichmann, like most perpetrators, merely pursued his own private interests. What made him notorious was that this pursuit had been structured by the principles of Nazi ideology.

Stanley Milgram concluded that “Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine” (1974, p. 23). Her portrayal of Nazi perpetrators as “completely normal” fit his finding that a majority of his experimental subjects had willingly obeyed the order to inflict strong electric shocks on a helpless victim. Milgram understood Arendt as saying that the Nazi authorities had reduced the individual to an instrument of power, that is, someone mostly concerned with the approval of his superiors. He took Eichmann’s alleged failure to exercise critical judgment—his “thoughtlessness”—to be the “principal cognitive basis of obedience” (Milgram, 1974, p. 163): obedient individuals abandon the personal process of continuous meaning-making—they stop trying to evaluate or make sense of their actions—and entrust authority with the right to define the significance of any given act. Obedience is “blind,” according to Milgram, because the perpetrators need not understand the reasons behind their actions, at the same time as they are unable or unwilling to face the harmful consequences and moral implications of those actions. The perpetrators feel no responsibility for their acts because they have ceased to see themselves as the source of their own behavior. They are no longer accountable to themselves. Even the men who dropped Zyklon-B into the gas chambers, Milgram argued, placed the responsibility for their actions on the authority that had given the order. For this reason “it would be wrong,” Milgram wrote, to think of the Nazi perpetrators’ standard defense that they had just done their duty “as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion” (Milgram, 1974, p. 26). Instead we should see it for what it was: an accurate depiction of the obedient individual’s psychology.

This acceptance of the truthfulness of the infamous “Nuremberg defense” moved Milgram’s allegedly value-neutral social science into the realm of law. It revealed what was at stake in his argument, namely, personal responsibility, legal accountability, and the idea of justice. The most dramatic conclusion that can be drawn from the situationist argument is that “any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do—given the same situational forces” (Zimbardo, 2007, p. 320). An anti-essentialist stance has thus become an anti-pluralist one: since we are not inherently different, we are all potentially alike. And if the perpetrators are not in principle different from us, if what separates them from us is mere circumstance, then who are we to judge?

The individual versus the social: A clash between anthropological assumptions

The classic conflict between structure and agency was at the root of both Arendt and Milgram’s accounts of the perpetrators. Arendt’s description of the Nazis as people unable to “think” seemed to undermine any coherent notion of individual agency; yet her rejection of obedience as an explanation of perpetrator behavior depended upon the view, defended by Arendt from her first publication, that individual subjectivities exist at “a remove from the collective subject” (Arendt, 1930/1994, p. 39). In what political theorist Judith Shklar (1977) called “an act of rational faith” (p. 90), Arendt believed that people possess an ability to imagine alternative social and political arrangements, and that this capacity enables individuals to transcend existing norms and to question them. Indeed, her view asserted that people have the moral responsibility to interrogate the principles behind the laws that affect them.

Arendt lambasted the social sciences for eliding the existence of such a capacity for independent judgment. These sciences, she argued, tended to portray the individual subjectivity as simply a reflection or result of social forces, thereby demoting the human being to “a creature who merely behaves differently in different situations” (2005, p. 105). The result, according to Arendt, was to deprive the human being of its dignity: its status as a free, unique, and unpredictable actor.

Arendt likewise criticized psychological science as a threat to the notions of individual uniqueness and human freedom. A science of psychology is inimical to a belief in individual uniqueness, Arendt claimed, because it aims to produce general statements about the human mind, which necessarily assumes that “inside we are all alike” (Arendt, 1978, pp. 34–35). Arendt urged that it would be a fundamental mistake to reduce “the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct” to the “monotonous sameness” (1978, p. 35) of inner emotions and cognitive processes described by psychology. Such a reductionist approach to the study of human behavior rapidly comes into conflict with the idea of human freedom, she argued, because it encourages the conviction that behavior can be explained by, or traced back to, its psychological antecedents. This belief, which Arendt detested, implies that action is not spontaneous—that action is determined by the social and psychological processes that preceded it, and would be predictable if only we could discover those antecedents. This, Arendt warned, was a totalitarian presumption; it invoked the vision of an effective and instrumental will, yet a will that was itself determined by hidden causes. Totalitarian ideology, in Arendt’s telling, rested on the claim to have discovered those secret causes and the pretention to know how to master them. Her response was to question the existence of such hidden causes and to deny the possibility of controlling them.

Arendt’s critique of psychology and the social sciences was part of this larger theoretical response to totalitarianism, both in its historicist and essentialist guises. As political theorist Bonnie Honig (1988) has pointed out, Arendt rejected the suggestion that we have an essence, a personality, or a coherent self that endures over time; rather, the self consists in a struggle among multiple conflicting forces that each contains a distinct potential for action or inaction. Arendt insisted that it is a morally and politically dangerous idea to think that we should overcome this inner struggle, for just as democratic politics depends on the protection of a plurality of differing viewpoints, so human freedom, according to Arendt, depends on a subjectivity that is multiple. The more autonomous and unitary the self—that is, the more one aspect of the self dominates the others—argued Arendt, the stronger the perceived link between self and action becomes, and with it the belief that human action can be explained by its psychological antecedents.

Arendt sought to break the perception of a causal connection between the private psychology of the person and the public world of action. Her conceptualization of the will played a central role in this effort. For Arendt, the will was “the organ of spontaneity”—it was not the outcome of social or psychological processes, but instead a mental faculty that non-determinedly and unpredictably decides upon one course of action among many possibilities. Action, in other words, is not the end-result of social or psychological processes, but rather the consequence of a momentary rupture, a spontaneously willed breakout from the multiplicity of the self. Action, then, does not reveal the actor’s “inner self,” but instead allows the actor to display him or herself “as an individual” (Arendt, 1978, p. 29).

Where Arendt believed that human dignity requires a radical conception of human freedom, Milgram averred that the notion of “human dignity” depends “on a respect for man’s potential to act morally” (Milgram, 1964, p. 851). Milgram defended such a conception of human dignity, perhaps against his own work, and claimed that the obedience experiments had not undermined his “belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to reject the dictates of authority”—that “between the command and the outcome there is a paramount force, the acting person” who has the “capacity for choosing his own behavior” (1964, p. 851). But where Arendt’s defense of human freedom was threatened to be eclipsed by her description of the “thoughtless” perpetrator, Milgram’s belief in people’s “potential to act morally” had to contend with his emphasis on how quickly human beings abandon their individuality in the service of authority, his speculation that obedience may be “a prepotent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct” (1963, p. 371), and his conclusion that obedient behavior is above all a function of the situation. For most social psychologists, this last point was the true lesson of “the banality of evil” (see Miller, 2004), undermining the idea of an autonomous moral self.

Arendt and Milgram’s claims about the human condition shaped their conceptions of political power and authority, personal responsibility, and, finally, their approaches to history. The remaining sections of this article will in turn deal with each of these effects of their arguments.

Consensus versus domination: The clash of political imaginations

Arendt’s deep commitment to human freedom led her to formulate normative definitions of political power and authority. She defined “the political” in ideal terms as a public realm of free discourse, where political action is a joint venture based on decisions reached through open deliberations. Arendt shared the view of a liberal tradition within political philosophy which holds that authority relies on a shared recognition of the right of some to rule and the duty of others to obey. She defined authority as the ability to demand action from others without coercing them or arguing with them (Arendt, 1961b, 1970). Against sociologist Max Weber’s (1922/1978) influential theory of politics Arendt argued that we must cease “to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion” and come to see that “obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion” (1970, pp. 44, 49). In Arendt’s vocabulary, political power was not power over, but power with others. She insisted that there is “no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters” (1964/2003b, p. 48) because she believed that the very term “obedience” obscured the extent to which individuals willfully acted in support of their governments. Obedience, she concluded, is simply “the outward manifestation of support and consent” (1970, p. 49).

This was not to deny the sociological point that a society’s ability to achieve collective projects relies on the organization of power into hierarchies of authority and subordination, suppressing conflicting opinions which would otherwise paralyze the ability to act in concert. But Arendt averred that it would be a “serious mistake” to forget that even totalitarian regimes “command and rest upon mass support” (1951/1967, p. 306). The Nazi regime’s right to prescribe behavior (i.e., its authority) and its ability to act in concert (its power) depended on the continued support of relevant sections of the population. According to Arendt, it was when large parts of the German population came to accept that the Nazis had a right to rule that mass atrocities became possible. This recognition of authority was part of a process of identification, Arendt claimed, whereby Germans began to see Nazism as a common enterprise. The Nazi worldview became the framework that gave their actions meaning.

Milgram agreed with Arendt that an authority’s ability to influence the behavior of others—that is, its power—derives, to “some degree,” from the “consent of those over whom [it] presides” (Milgram, 1974, pp. 160–161). He followed Weber, however, in emphasizing the social organization of power and authority, and in this regard would have surely dismissed Arendt’s claim that “obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion” (1970, p. 49). In Milgram’s view, the “asymmetrical dominance-subordination” structure of the situation was the primary cause of obedience; it was the norms of the situation—not ideological conviction or consent—that generated obedience in the experiment and that tends to shape obedient behavior in general. Milgram thought the beliefs of those who obey to be “largely irrelevant” as long as those beliefs are “not transformed into action.” The attitudes of concentration camp guards, for example, were “of no consequence” when those guards allowed “the slaughter of innocent men to take place before them” (Milgram, 1974, p. 28).

Here Milgram expressed a form of behavioristic reductionism, for he did not even allow the rationalist concern with beliefs to enter into his analysis. The decisive point for Milgram was that obedient actions publicly expressed consent and conferred legitimacy upon authority. In his account, submission to authority became the central psychological and behavioral component of political action.

Explanation versus judgment: The clash of normative imaginations

Arendt rejected the term “obedience” precisely because it appeared to reduce political action to acts of submission—turning the willful act of political recognition into a psychological abdication of agency. In Arendt’s view, the concept of obedience accompanied the social-scientific tendency to portray perpetrators as “cogs” in the “machinery” of larger social and political systems. She cautioned that such an approach abstracts human freedom out of its accounts of social behavior, which in turn risks undermining the notion of personal responsibility upon which the logic of justice depends. If the perpetrator claims to have been a “cog” in the machinery of destruction, a court of law asks “why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?” (Arendt, 1964/2003b, p. 31). “If the accused wishes to shift responsibilities,” Arendt pointed out, “he must … implicate other persons, he must name names, and these persons appear then as possible codefendants, they do not appear as the embodiment of bureaucratic or any other necessity” (Arendt, 1964/2003b, p. 31).

Arendt’s study of Nazi violence was motivated in large part by the question of how to hold perpetrators personally accountable in an age of state-organized mass murder. But her thought remained torn between her ontological and normative claims about human freedom, the capacity for individual moral judgment, and personal responsibility, on the one side, and her recognition of the human tendency to act without critical reflection, on the other. In fact, as legal scholar Mark Osiel has observed, Arendt “directed her argument concerning the ‘banality of evil’ primarily [emphasis added] at the criminal law” (2001, p. 149) and its doctrine of manifest illegality—a doctrine that had provided the conceptual foundations for the whole series of war crimes trials against Nazi perpetrators, and that continues to exert its influence today through the Rome Statute, the instrument that established the International Criminal Court. The doctrine of manifest illegality relieves defendants of liability if they acted under orders that were “legal,” if they “did not know that the order was unlawful,” and if the “order was not manifestly unlawful” (Rome Statute, 2002, Article 33; see Luban, 2011, p. 639).

Arendt remarked that the doctrine of manifest illegality demands that defendants should have nurtured a “feeling of lawfulness” deep within themselves that would have contradicted “the law of the land” (Arendt, 1964/2003b, p. 40). In the “Postscript” to Eichmann in Jerusalem she noted how this legal requirement presupposes that human beings are “capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is their own judgment, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around them” (Arendt, 1965, pp. 294–295). The judgment of the Israeli court that Eichmann should have perceived the criminal nature of his actions presumed that he could have done so.

But Arendt suspected that the perpetrator had never realized the wrongfulness of his actions. In her view, the Eichmann case revealed that our judgment of the perpetrators cannot presuppose an intention to do wrong, nor can it even assume any straightforward connection between personal motives and actual behavior. Certain social psychologists have derived a similar lesson from Milgram’s experiments (see Miller, 2004). Lee Ross and Donna Shestowsky, for example, have argued that the “situation-driven perpetrator” should make us reconsider our very conceptions of law and justice in the aftermath of mass atrocity in ways that might even compel us to recommend “leniency for Nazi prison guards or other perpetrators of genocide” (Ross & Shestowsky, 2003, p. 1102). According to Ross and Shestowsky, situationist conclusions should force us to relinquish cherished concepts of free will and personal responsibility. Neither Arendt nor Milgram, however, were ready to surrender either of these notions. “If there is a moral to be learned from the obedience study,” Milgram wrote, “it is that every man must be responsible for his own actions” (Milgram, 1964, p. 852). The individual, he insisted, “must really assert himself as a person against a legitimate authority” (1964, p. 851) and resist “the psychological attitude induced by submission to authority”—an attitude in which the “person who assumes responsibility [evaporates]” (Milgram, 1973, p. 77).

This invocation of an autonomous moral agent did not acknowledge the full implications of Arendt’s argument; Milgram still supposed that individuals know the difference between right and wrong and that they simply fail to transform moral knowledge into moral action. But while this was clearly the case with many of his obedient participants, it was not obviously true about Eichmann. Arendt’s position was, in this sense, more radical than Milgram’s, for she proposed that Nazi perpetrators possibly developed a mentality that made them unaware of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Arendt might have responded to Milgram that a concept of personal responsibility cannot be based on a requirement to assert one’s personal values in the face of legitimate authority, when those values are themselves handed down by that authority.

Arendt came to the conclusion that the basis for personal responsibility and criminal punishment must be severed from the subjective intent to do wrong (see Luban, 2011). The result, with regard to the Nazi perpetrators, was a rather harsh conception of justice—a conception that bracketed questions about free will and intention, questions regarding chains of command as well as the issue of duress. Arendt famously ended Eichmann in Jerusalem with her own judgment, directly addressing the defendant: “Let us assume, for the sake of argument,” she responded to Eichmann, “that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder” (1963, p. 279). Recall that, for Arendt, in politics obedience equals support because the consequences of one’s actions are the same, regardless of subjective intentions. It was for his actions, not his thoughts or intentions, that Eichmann stood accused: “And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of numerous other nations,” she concluded her judgment of Eichmann, “we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang” (1963, p. 279). It was the nature of the crime, not the psychology of the criminal that justified punishment.

This judgment was an answer to the moral impulse not to let the killers get away with murder; Arendt held the perpetrator personally responsible for his own actions, even if the outcome of those actions had been beyond both his foresight and control. Indeed, here Arendt surely agreed with her ex-husband, Günther Anders (1964), who wrote an “open letter” to Eichmann’s son wherein he argued that the perpetrator’s inability to imagine the ultimate consequences of his actions should have furnished ethical grounds for refusing to act at all.

Furthermore, Arendt’s judgment of the perpetrators was also a pragmatic conclusion to her account of human action: just as action takes precedent over the actor in Arendt’s political theory, action condemns the actor in her normative response to atrocity. Because we only display ourselves as individuals through our actions, we can only be judged on the basis of those actions. Eichmann’s actions did not reveal who he “really was”; as we have seen, Arendt rejected such an essentialist and unhistorical conception of self. On the contrary, his actions may often have been spontaneous and surprising, even to himself—that, according to Arendt, is in the nature of human action. This is why, she argued, the meaning and the moral gravity of particular actions become fully evident only in retrospect; the interpretation and evaluation of an act are in the hands of the audience. Arendt’s depiction of Eichmann was a powerful act of historical judgment. To ridicule him as banal and thoughtless was an attempt to fix his identity in those humiliating terms—and the impact of Arendt’s account on our historical imagination might be the worst punishment Eichmann could have received.

Eventful versus experimental temporality: A clash between historical imaginations

In the end, it was Milgram’s experimental method that ensured the incommensurability of his own social-psychological account of obedience and Arendt’s analysis of the Nazi perpetrators. While Milgram repeatedly invoked the Holocaust and Arendt’s description of Eichmann as historical analogies to his findings, the idea that his experimental research could help explain this history relied on a view of history that was irreconcilable with Arendt’s approach.

Arendt believed that historical analysis should be about unpacking the elements of particular historical phenomena, that is, the “individual occurrences and their special separate causes” (Arendt, 1961a, p. 61), and not about identifying general causal structures and processes. In her view, social scientists and many historians ruin “the factual and particular” through their search for “the seemingly higher validity of general ‘meanings’” (Arendt, 1961a, p. 81; ironically, Shklar, 1977, criticized Arendt for the same reason). Their mistake has serious consequences. Arendt argued that the search for underlying, hidden causes of history denies the existence of human freedom and betrays a “mistrust of the mind” (more specifically, its ability to perceive reality) by seeking “a reality that is more original than the mind itself” (Arendt, 1930/1994, p. 33).

Arendt saw totalitarianism as a result of this modern tendency to think about social reality in terms of hidden causes; totalitarianism was the political expression of the view of history as a meaningful process. Just as social-scientific methods might encourage researchers to look beyond and behind reality in search of a larger, more profound truth, totalitarian ideologies claimed to have discovered the hidden laws of history, be they biological or social in origin. The designation of history as a process structured by hidden laws was then used to devalue actual human experience in favor of utopian visions of the future.

Arendt’s conception of history depended upon what sociologist William Sewell has called an “eventful temporality”—the view that historical events are radically contingent, inherently unpredictable, unexpected, and able to “undo or alter the most apparently durable trends of history” (2005, p. 102). According to this perspective, people’s actions bring about events that are transformative, inaugurating wholly novel ways of perceiving the world and thereby “transforming the very cultural categories that shape and constrain human action” (Sewell, 2005, p. 101). In this view social causality is itself “temporally heterogeneous”; it varies across time. What might explain a given action in one historical context may not explain a similar action at another point in time, because the very meaning of the action might have changed. For this reason Arendt argued that any real understanding must be grounded in historical analyses that focus on the content of particular historical phenomena and resist the temptation to identify them with transhistorical forms or functions. To grasp events we must scramble to create new categories of meaning, rather than refer back to ready-made explanations. In Arendt’s opinion, the social sciences, with their methods of explaining events by describing their general functions or locating them in a continuous and structured process, were unable to recognize and theorize “unprecedented” historical events like the Holocaust (see Baehr, 2010).

Arendt’s eventful conception of history—based on her conviction that human action is spontaneous and creative—downplayed the notion of path dependency and emphasized the importance of rupture. Arendt insisted that every individual born into history has the potential to interrupt the flow of that history. At the same time she pointed out that people live their lives among the conflicting wills and intentions of others, making it impossible for them to predict the outcomes of their actions. This unpredictability is what renders history inherently contingent; it is the reason why history can only be written retrospectively, since we can only make sense of actions in terms of what they produced, not in terms of what the actors actually intended.

But also Arendt made claims about human psychology that she thought would apply across time and context; even she believed that people are motivated by a common core of interests throughout much of history (e.g., needs for security, social acceptance, prestige, and prosperity, as well as a tendency to comply mindlessly with norms), which create continuities that help in the analysis of actions at different moments in time.

In fact, situationist social psychology, with its focus on the psychological and behavioral effects of sudden, unexpected shifts in normative frameworks, should be eminently well-suited to provide an Arendtian account of history. Arendt insisted that we should resist writing what novelist Philip Roth has described as “harmless history,” where “everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable” (Roth, 2004, p. 114). Much work in social psychology explores precisely those moments when people encounter situations that take them by surprise and challenge their moral habits. “The experiment gives the subject little time for reflection,” Milgram wrote about his study; the “conflict” between obedience and the disposition not to harm others “comes on rapidly,” as the victim begins his protests only minutes after the participant has been seated in front of the shock generator (Milgram, 1963, p. 378). How will the individual respond to this wholly novel situation? What happens to people when they cross the threshold between two normatively opposed realities? When social-psychological theories take care not to domesticate the eventfulness of history, they may properly access and address some of the most profound and terrible predicaments confronting human beings. (The current emphasis within social psychology on the importance of “construal” can also be seen to point toward a more Arendtian and eventful conception of human action. The ways in which we construe—or interpret—situations are, after all, contingent results of historical experience.)

Yet, on a deeper level, Milgram and his experimental social psychology imagined history very differently from Arendt. While Milgram, like Arendt, emphasized situational contingency and the explanatory importance of normative frameworks, his experimental method relied more fundamentally on an “experimental temporality.” According to Sewell, experimental temporality rests on two unhistorical assumptions: first, that various historical events can be treated as phenomenologically equivalent and, second, that they can be treated as independent of each other. In contrast to an eventful temporality, wherein social causality varies across time, an experimental conception of historical time assumes that social causality is uniform throughout history. This perception of permanence, wrote Sewell, allows comparative social scientists to treat historical events “as analogous to separate ‘trials’ of an experiment” (2005, p. 95). History turns into a storehouse of data against which to test one’s hypotheses and general theories.

Experimental social psychologists wanting to explain mass atrocity simply do it the other way around: rather than treating history as a natural experiment, they follow Milgram’s example and apply the theoretical explanations of their experimental findings to history. In the 1990s, Holocaust historian Christopher Browning used a similar analytic approach and drew on experimental social-psychological findings in a highly influential interpretation of the actions and statements of a group of German policemen sent east to massacre and deport Polish Jews. Browning’s conclusion confirmed the central situationist claim: ordinary men became genocidal killers because they found themselves in a context where killing was expected of them. “I must recognize,” Browning conceded, “that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader” (1992/1998, p. xx). This situationist explanation of the German policemen’s actions momentarily brought social psychology to the forefront of Holocaust historiography—and the ensuing debate between Browning and political scientist Daniel Goldhagen (1996, 1998) was centrally concerned with the value of social psychology for the historical study of perpetrators.

Browning argued that it was precisely social psychology’s ahistorical character that made it so useful for the historian: because social psychologists attempt to isolate general human tendencies toward obedience, conformity, role behavior, etc., they produce insights and concepts that can be deployed in a critical reading of historical sources—in this case, statements made by the perpetrators about their own motives and actions. “For scholars studying motivation in concrete historical situations, in which variables cannot be isolated and historical actors are not themselves fully conscious of the complex interaction of factors that shape their behavior,” Browning wrote, “such [social-psychological] insights can … be invaluable for sifting through problematic evidence” (1992/1998, p. 219). Experimental social psychology, in other words, is supposed to offer a way to unmask the perpetrators, a tool to assess their self-presentations and identify motives beyond the conscious mind. But in Browning’s case, social psychology provided no such critical counterweight to the perpetrators’ own statements; the postwar testimony of the former policemen, perhaps seeking to minimize their guilt in the eyes of the law, fit nicely with situationist claims about group loyalty, conformity, and obedience. Browning’s use of social psychology affirmed the situationist claim to explain this history.