The evil that German philosopher Hannah Arendt confronted was the phenomenon of totalitarian terror, vividly, but by no means exclusively, exemplified by the mass slaughter of Jews. She saw this phenomenon as marking not only a rupture with civilization that shattered all previously engraved images of Europe as a civilized community, but also an assault on human categories of thought and standards of judgment. She argued that it created particular difficulties of understanding for the social sciences because it contradicted all ways of thinking that presuppose an element of rational choice or a means/ends calculation on the part of social players. The frenzy of destruction that was the hallmark of totalitarian terror seemed to exceed all political, economic, or military utility. Arendt did not suggest that the death camps and other institutions of totalitarian terror were, therefore, beyond human understanding, but rather that if we...