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      Milgram, Genocide and Bureaucracy: A Post-Weberian Perspective

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            Abstract

            The link between Stanley Milgram's experimental study of obedience in 1963 and the explanation of the Holocaust during the Second World War has been the subject of controversy for the past five decades. Russell and Gregory (2015) offer the latest reflections on this relationship. Hannah Arendt's analysis of Eichmann centred on the image of desk murderers mindlessly processing military orders. Milgram invoked pervasive evidence of compliance to morally reprehensible commands in his experimental study of obedience. The joint Arendt–Milgram perspective has recently fallen into disrespect as a result of voluntarism evidenced in recent studies of ordinary Germans in participation in mass murder. Russell and Gregory's contribution advances an essentially Weberian explanation for the behaviour of perpetrators. Their analysis of the obedience experiments concludes that all the participants were constrained by a normative structure that led them to ignore harm to subjects as a result of the larger bureaucratic mindset that allowed Milgram's assistants, his funders and his subjects to suppress acknowledgement of injury. They argue that this recapitulates key features of the Holocaust. The recent historiography of the Holocaust points to a post-Weberian understanding of the bureaucracies at the heart of the genocide – the slave labour program in Germany and German-occupied territory, and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, where evidence points to a conscious and enthusiastic endorsement of the homicidal objectives of the Nazi regime.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.13169
            statecrime
            State Crime Journal
            Pluto Journals
            20466056
            20466064
            1 October 2016
            : 5
            : 2
            : 287-305
            Affiliations
            [1 ] University of Calgary;
            [2 ] University of Melbourne;
            Article
            statecrime.5.2.0287
            10.13169/statecrime.5.2.0287
            f13433f1-8e87-4238-8dc1-06f858d1c925
            © 2016 International State Crime Initiative

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Categories

            Criminology
            banality of evil,iron cage of rationality,Milgram's obedience research,Nazi slave labour,polycratic bureaucracy,political responsibility (Arendt)

            References

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