The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality rather than an anomaly

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

While the necessity to ask this question seems both a most urgent and a most ignobly neglected part of the Holocaust legacy, its consequences must be carefully considered. It is only too easy to over-react to the apparent bankruptcy of established sociological visions. Once the hope to contain the Holocaust experience in the theoretical framework of malfunction (modernity incapable of suppressing the essentially alien factors of irrationality, civilizing pressures failing to subdue emotional and violent drives, socialization going awry and hence unable to produce the needed volume of moral motivations) has been dashed, one can be easily tempted to try the ‘obvious’ exit from the theoretical impasse; to proclaim the Holocaust a ‘paradigm’ of modern civilization, its ‘natural’, ‘normal’ (who knows – perhaps also common) product, its ‘historical tendency’. In this version, the Holocaust would be promoted to the status of truth of modernity (rather than recognized as a possibility that modernity contains) – the truth only superficially concealed by the ideological formula imposed by those who benefit from the ‘big lie’. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 49 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scholars shifted Holocaust study from Hitler to the bureaucratic middlemen — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 47; The Holocaust’s uniqueness does not make it incomparable to other genocides — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 516; Early Holocaust research blamed individual authoritarian personalities, not social processes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 40 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality, not a rupture from it. #corroborates (1.00) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 258
• The Holocaust exemplifies modern bureaucratic rationality applied to maximum-efficiency ends. #expands (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 425
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm #complicates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 49
• Modern scholarship downplays antisemitism’s unique ideological role in the Holocaust #complicates (0.75)
• The Holocaust was not the logical culmination of prior antisemitism #complicates (0.72)