An Important Milgram-Holocaust Linkage: Formal Rationality

Authors

  • Nestar Russell University of Calgary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29173/cjs28291

Keywords:

Milgram, Holocaust, Formal Rationality, Weber, Ritzer

Abstract

After Stanley Milgram published his first official Obedience to Authority baseline experiment, some scholars drew parallels between his findings and the Holocaust. These comparisons are now termed the Milgram-Holocaust linkage. However, because the Obedience studies have been shown to differ in many ways from the Holocaust’s finer historical details, more recent literature has challenged the linkage. In this article I argue that the Obedience studies and the Holocaust share two commonalities that are so significant that they may negate the importance others have attributed to the differences. These commonalities are (1) an end-goal of maximising “ordinary” people’s participation in harm infliction and (2) a reliance on Weberian formal rational techniques of discovery to achieve this end-goal. Using documents obtained from Milgram’s personal archive at Yale University, this article reveals the means-to-end learning processes Milgram utilised during his pilot studies in order to maximise ordinary people’s participation in harm-infliction in his official baseline experiment. This article then illustrates how certain Nazi innovators relied on the same techniques of discovery during the invention of the Holocaust, more specifically the so-called Holocaust by bullets. In effect, during both the Obedience studies and the Holocaust processes were developed that made, in each case, the undoable doable.

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Published

2017-09-29

Issue

Vol. 42 No. 3 (2017)

Section

Articles

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