Modernity and the Holocaust

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.

• Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
• Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era: Text and Readings
• Liquid Modernity
• Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism
• Intersectionality (Key Concepts)
• The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition
• The Racial Contract
• The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age
• The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures)
• Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform