Algorithmic Governance and the Banality of Evil: Arendt’s Critique of Technocratic Depersonalization

This paper examines structural parallels between 20th-century totalitarianism and 21st-century technocratic governance through Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. This paper argues that modern techno-bureaucratic systems—particularly algorithmic governance—reproduce specific features of totalitarian logic: the displacement of personal judgment, the diffusion of moral responsibility, and the reduction of persons to functional categories. While totalitarianism achieved this through ideological terror, technocracy achieves it through procedural rationality and epistemic authority. This comparison does not suggest moral equivalence but identifies shared mechanisms that threaten moral autonomy. The analysis concludes that Arendt’s critique provides resources for understanding these dangers and argues for cultivating the faculty of judgment to resist depersonalizing tendencies in contemporary governance.