Existentialist categories migrated into postwar social science via Riesman, Goffman, and Arendt

Evidence

Along with the fiction came a new kind of non-fiction from a new breed: the sociologist, psychologist or philosopher as existentialist rebel. David Riesman led the way with his study of modern alienation, The Lonely Crowd, in 1950. A flurry in 1956 included Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, William Whyte’s Organization Man and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. The most dramatic work of existentialist non-fiction was written a little later by a member of the old guard: Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem, begun as a New Yorker article and developed into a book, concerned the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust. Having attended the trial and observed his curiously blank responses, Arendt interpreted him as the ultimate Man in the Grey Suit. For her, he was a mindless bureaucrat so in thrall to the Heideggerian ‘they’ that he had lost all human individuality and responsibility, a phenomenon which she characterised as ‘the banality of evil’. Her interpretation was controversial, as were other aspects of the book, but it fascinated an audience that was now in a moral panic, not about extreme beliefs, but about the very opposite: faceless, mindless conformism. Partly in response to Arendt’s work, researchers such as Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo perfected experiments exploring just how far people would go in obeying orders. The results were alarming: almost everyone, it seemed, was willing to inflict torture if a sufficiently authoritative figure commanded it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 895

Categorization

• XREF: Links Heidegger’s concept of ‘the they’ (das Man) directly into Arendt’s banality of evil, which connects to my existing notes on the social control of trust and Milgram’s obedience work. — connects to: Existentialism directly fueled the rights movements of mid-century — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 889; Existentialist concepts now operate as unlabeled common culture — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1000; Existentialist subject-Other opposition provided the framework for feminist analysis — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 13 (+2 more)
• SEED: Possible essay angle: the intellectual migration of a philosophical concept (das Man) from an abstruse German treatise into Milgram’s shock experiments and the very phrase ‘the banality of evil.’
• ADDENDUM: Milgram obedience experiments fit as supporting material for the article on sacrifice — obedience to authority as a mechanism that makes ritual or commanded killing possible.

Broader Connections

• Institutions are the foundation for social-system self-presentation through Goffman’s teams #exemplifies (0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 295
• Trust stems from societal self-presentation conditions, not only individual strategies as Goffman holds. #qualifies (0.72)