SOC 001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Panopticism

• School: Pasadena City College
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 001
• Professor: lookholder

Document Summary

Bauman argues holocaust emerged from a common type of modern thinking and utilized otherwise normal forms of social organization: modernity"s garden culture , rationalized forms of social organization- i. e. , bureaucracy. Garden culture- modernist dream of creating a perfect society; weeding out undesirable elements. Bureaucratized mass murder: how bureaucracy enabled the holocaust: Hierarchical and functional division of labor: practically and mentally distanced perpetrators from a) outcome of and b) responsibility for their actions, substitutes technical considerations for moral ones- i. e. , just doing my job . Value-free language: cargo not human beings , bath houses not gas chambers . What bureaucracy needed was the definition of its task. Rational and efficient as it was, it could be trusted to see that task to its end. Once set in motion, the machinery of murder developed its own impetus . Achievement of modern civilization not so much about getting rid of violence but relocating it.