L'ordinarietà del male. Il contesto morale della violenza

This essay revisits Hannah Arendt’s paradigm of the “banality of evil” and its influence on studies of perpetrators, from Milgram and Zimbardo to Browning’s analysis of “ordinary men”. While acknowledging the importance of this tradition, it highlights its limits: violence cannot be explained only as obedience, moral absence or bureaucratic delegation. The article proposes instead an anthropological approach to the active cultural construction of violent subjectivity. Drawing on Freud, Joanna Bourke and Richard Rechtman, it examines how war, genocide and mass violence create specific moral regimes in which killing becomes a learned, embodied and ordinary practice. Evil is thus understood not as an exception to culture, but as one of its possible forms.