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Modernity and the holocaust

Front Cover
14 Reviews
Cornell University Press, 1989 - Philosophy - 267 pages
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.
  

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Review: Modernity and the Holocaust

User Review  - Veronika - Goodreads

It was nice, sometimes all the same all the time :) Read full review

Review: Modernity and the Holocaust

User Review  - Jeff - Goodreads

Bauman's writing style can be lengthy at times. The organization of the book could have been better, and main points are also revisited from nearly the same angle which makes some sections feel ... Read full review

All 11 reviews »

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Contents

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
Notes
251
Copyright

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Diasporas
James Clifford - 1994 - Cultural Anthropology
Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension
Scott Lash - Theory, Culture & Society
Collective Memory: The Two Cultures
Jeffrey K Olick - 1999 - Sociological Theory
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References from web pages

Book - ZYGMUNT BAUMAN - Modernity and the Holocaust
The Polity book catalogue page for ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, Modernity and the Holocaust.
www.polity.co.uk/ book.asp?ref=0745609309

JSTOR: Modernity and the Holocaust.
Modernity and the Holocaust. By Zygmunt Bauman. Ithaca, ny: Cor- nell University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv + 224. $29.95. Moishe Postone University of Chicago ...
links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=0002-9602(199203)97%3A5%3C1521%3AMATH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

6. Mary Lowenthal Felstiner: Women, Modernity and the Holocaust
What the Holocaust is, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman claims in his book Modernity and the Holocaust, is the ultimate test of modernity: ...
www.remember.org/ educate/ fels.html

Modernity and the Holocaust
Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. x, 33. Bartov, Murder. in. Our. Midrt, pp. 17,56,60,66176-. Such. arguments share with conservative intellectuals ...
www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/ abs/ 10.1111/ j.1467-8497.1997.tb01398.x

Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman | librarything
All about Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman. librarything is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers.
www.librarything.com/ work/ 92524

antisemitism, holocaust and modernity
He alludes to his own family experience in a book entitled "Modernity and the Holocaust".13 Bauman is of course not alone in attacking the Enlightenment ...
sicsa.huji.ac.il/ modernity.html

Reviews : Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity ...
Automatic download [Begin manual download]. Downloading the PDF version of: Thesis Eleven Rechter 34 (1): 196. (558K) ...
the.sagepub.com/ cgi/ reprint/ 34/ 1/ 196?ck=nck

SCOLAR Learning Environment - Holocaust MA
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 2nd ed, (Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 1993) and selections from Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity (Oxford: ...
www.rhul.ac.uk/ scolar/ holocaust-ma/ syllabus/ options-post-holocaust-philosophy.html

Bryan Cheyette - Liberal Anti-Judaism and the Victims of Modernity ...
Even a glance at one or two books in this area--Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, Gillian Rose's Judaism and Modernity (1993), and the interventions of ...
muse.jhu.edu/ journals/ american_literary_history/ v013/ 13.3cheyette.html

Information and Technology in the Holocaust
In Modernity and the Holocaust , Zygmunt Bauman asserts that information technology was not available at the time of the Nazi Genocide of the Jews: ...
www2.iath.virginia.edu/ holocaust/ infotech.html

About the author (1989)

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most significant global social thinkers of our age. His work, spanning nearly five decades, steadfastly refuses to be constrained by arbitrary disciplinary boundaries within the arts, humanities and social sciences. An extraordinarily productive scholar, his writings continue to be relevant to his host subject of sociology, but also to social and political theory, philosophy, ethics, art theory, media/communications studies, cultural studies, and theology.

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