The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends.

Evidence

Considered as a complex purposeful operation, the Holocaust may serve as a paradigm of modern bureaucratic rationality. Almost everything was done to achieve maximum results with minimum costs and efforts. Almost everything (within the realm of the possible) was done to deploy the skills and resources of everybody involved, including those who were to become the victims of the successful operation. Almost all pressures irrelevant or adversary to the purpose of the operation were neutralized or put out of action altogether. Indeed, the story of the organization of the Holocaust could be made into a textbook of scientific management. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 425

Categorization

• SEED: Angles toward an essay on efficiency as a morally neutral value that any purpose — including extermination — can annex.
• XREF: connects to: The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 21; The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 32; The Holocaust reveals civilization’s capacity for industrialized destruction as inseparable from its progress. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 62 (+7 more)

Related

• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.90)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.88)
• The Holocaust reveals civilization’s capacity for industrialized destruction as inseparable from its progress. (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust succeeded partly through victims’ rational actions. (similarity 0.87)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.85)
• The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure (similarity 0.84)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.84)
• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust (similarity 0.83)
• Historical scholarship increasingly supports the functionalist view of Holocaust causation. (similarity 0.83)
• Instrumental rationality cannot prevent mass atrocities and normalizes social engineering. (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.82)
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.82)
• Victim cooperation made the Holocaust bureaucratically feasible and historically distinctive. (similarity 0.82)
• Modern civilization was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Holocaust. (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Social engineering ambition combined with concentrated power produced the Holocaust #corroborates (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 224
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 207