Modernity and the HolocaustCornell University Press, 2000 - 267 sidor A new afterword to this edition, "The Duty to Remember--But What?" tackles difficult issues of guilt and innocence on the individual and societal levels. Zygmunt Bauman explores the silences found in debates about the Holocaust, and asks what the historical facts of the Holocaust tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life. He finds great danger in such phenomena as the seductiveness of martyrdom; going to extremes in the name of safety; the insidious effects of tragic memory; and efficient, "scientific" implementation of the death penalty. Bauman writes, "Once the problem of the guilt of the Holocaust perpetrators has been by and large settled... the one big remaining question is the innocence of all the rest--not the least the innocence of ourselves."Among the conditions that made the mass extermination of the Holocaust possible, according to Bauman, the most decisive factor was modernity itself. Bauman's provocative interpretation counters the tendency to reduce the Holocaust to an episode in Jewish history, or to one that cannot be repeated in the West precisely because of the progressive triumph of modern civilization. He demonstrates, rather, that we must understand the events of the Holocaust as deeply rooted in the very nature of modern society and in the central categories of modern social thought. |
Innehåll
Introduction Sociology after the Holocaust | 1 |
The Holocaust as the test of modernity | 6 |
The meaning of the civilizing process | 12 |
Social production of moral indifference | 18 |
Social production of moral invisibility | 24 |
Moral consequences of the civilizing process | 27 |
Modernity Racism Extermination I | 31 |
Some peculiarities of Jewish estrangement | 33 |
Conclusions | 111 |
Soliciting the Cooperation of the Victims | 117 |
Sealing off the victims | 122 |
The save what you can game | 129 |
Individual rationality in the service of collective destruction | 135 |
Rationality of selfpreservation | 142 |
Conclusion | 149 |
The Ethics of Obedience Reading Milgram | 151 |
Jewish incongruity from Christendom to modernity | 37 |
Astride the barricades | 41 |
The prismatic group | 42 |
Modern dimensions of incongruity | 46 |
The nonnational nation | 52 |
The modernity of racism | 56 |
Modernity Racism Extermination II | 61 |
From heterophobia to racism | 62 |
Racism as a form of social engineering | 66 |
From repellence to extermination | 72 |
Looking ahead | 77 |
The Uniqueness and Normality of the Holocaust | 83 |
The problem | 85 |
Genocide extraordinary | 88 |
Peculiarity of modern genocide | 93 |
Effects of the hierarchical and functional divisions of labour | 98 |
Dehumanization of bureaucratic objects | 102 |
The role of bureaucracy in the Holocaust | 104 |
Bankruptcy of modern safeguards | 107 |
Inhumanity as a function of social distance | 155 |
Complicity after ones own act | 157 |
Technology moralized | 159 |
Freefloating responsibility | 161 |
Pluralism of power and power of conscience | 163 |
The social nature of evil | 166 |
Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality | 169 |
Society as a factory of morality | 170 |
The challenge of the Holocaust | 175 |
Presocietal sources of morality | 179 |
Social proximity and moral responsibility | 184 |
Social suppression of moral responsibility | 188 |
Social production of distance | 192 |
Final remarks | 198 |
Afterthought Rationality and Shame | 201 |
The European Amalfi Prize Lecture | 208 |
Afterword to the 2000 Edition | 222 |
251 | |