GENOCIDE, CIVILIZATION AND MODERNITY

The intention of this paper is to vindicate the historical sociology o f genocide. This project demonstrates important continuities as well a s discontinuities in the history of genocide. These findings call into question the thesis of Zygmunt Bauman that the modernity of the Holoc aust challenges orthodox approaches to the sociology of morality and p olitics. While the Holocaust undoubtedly manifested distinctive featur es of modern society, it also reproduced ancient motivational and stru ctural sources of genocide. What follows from this analysis is not, as Bauman argues, a radical critique of modern civilization, but a clear er view of the interrelations between the constructive and destructive features of all civilizations. If modernity produced the Holocaust, i t also produced the sociological and moral critique of genocide.