The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions

Evidence

Bauman’s account begins from a seemingly simple question: How modern is the Holocaust? The parameters of Bauman’s response to this question are framed around his concern to show that the Holocaust is very much the product of quintessentially modern social and political conditions, forces, and relations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 170

Zygmunt Bauman’s characterizes the Holocaust as the ultimate expression of the genocidal tendency in racial and ethnic hatred. Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust has been an important point of reference in discussions concerning the Holocaust over the past decade or so, reflecting a wider literature that has grown up in sociology and other disciplines. Bauman’s account begins from a seemingly simple question: How modern is the Holocaust? The parameters of Bauman’s response to this question are framed around his concern to show that the Holocaust is very much the product of quintessentially modern social and political conditions, forces, and relations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 170

Categorization

• QUESTION: Bauman’s argument that mass genocide is a product of modernity rather than a reversion to barbarism is worth chasing — does modernity’s bureaucratization enable rather than prevent atrocity?
• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s institutional analysis and the darker side of modern rationalized systems; also resonates with Zamyatin’s We and the paradox of rationalized dystopia. — connects to: Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 253
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 170