The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it.

Evidence

As I noted above, a leading student of modernity, Zygmunt Bauman, argues that the Holocaust stands as the essence of modern bureaucratic rationality. Writer Edwin Black (2001) has recently argued that the Holocaust could not have assumed its systematic and mechanical shape without the card punch and sorting devices that were manufactured for the Third Reich by IBM and its European affiliates and adapted for use in tracking death camp populations. Dominick LaCapra (1994, 1998) suggests that the mechanized death of Nazi concentration camps reveals the way that bureaucratic and scientific rationality remains deeply joined to the ritual spheres that it was supposed to displace. Michael Taussig (1997) characterizes the foundations of the nation-state as magical; state hegemony ultimately rests, he argues, on the circulation of ritual means for invoking the dead. In referring to the twentieth century as “an age of genocide,” Rogers Smith (1987) seems to suggest that these events are not isolated, accidental, or atypical but shape the very core of high modernity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s work on how institutions and bureaucratic structures shape behavior, and to the broader theme of modernity’s dark side. — connects to: Bureaucratic ‘doing’ orientation enables genocide without personal hatred of victims. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1809
• QUESTION: Bauman’s claim that mass murder is the essence of bureaucratic rationality — worth chasing his full argument and evaluating counterexamples.