Social Theory After the Holocaust

Introduction
The contributions to this volume address aspects of social theorising which,
however indirectly, have been, or have allowed themselves to be, influenced in
some way by that event. While they share a concern with the ways in which social
theory might address the Holocaust as an object, they ask how some of social
theory’s key claims might be or have been affected through confrontation with
the Holocaust. This is not to say that all of the contributions here draw the
conclusions which Bauman does. While those of Turner and Stone use the
Holocaust as an occasion to call into question conventionally accepted notions
of history, those of Adler, Salter and Gorman conclude that established pre-
Holocaust categories are still able to do an effective job in making sense of the
dilemmas of the present. 6 Nor is it the case that there was no post-Holocaust
social theory before Bauman stated that there needed to be one. As Robert Fine
makes clear, the work of Hannah Arendt is a series of theoretical responses to
the Holocaust. The ‘late Marxism’ of Adorno is the clearest example of an
attempt to guard against philosophy’s complicity in the justification of a crime
against humanity, his negative dialectics the working out of a grammar of eternal
vigilance. The extension of that grammar into a more robust conception of ethics
is the challenge which Jay Bernstein has identified in the work of Jean-François
Lyotard, and which is taken up by Andrew Benjamin with respect to the
theorisation of friendship, popular once again.
To this one should add that in the 1950s newly published material from the
camps was a challenge to the theorisation of such matters as super- and
subordination. Studies such as Kogon’s were referred to by Erving Goffman in
Asylums, devoted to the study of the mental hospital as a total institution,
emphasising props, clothing, front and back regions, and artefacts as resources
for the maintenance of selfhood; the implied vulnerability of the social self; and
the precariousness of the human sense of reality. In the context of post-war
American complacency, this was a notable achievement, and with interpretative
licence might be read as a veiled response to the stripping away of such artefacts
in the camps. More prosaically, the centrality attributed by Giddens to
‘ontological security’ as a basic problem of modernity might be described as a
piece of post-Holocaust social theorising. In a more direct reference to the
Holocaust, Lawrence Langer’s great study of testimony ended with the claim
that once one takes witnesses’ accounts seriously, much of the narrative
conception of selfhood which proved so popular in the seventies and eighties,
and which sustains an influential body of moral and political theory, falls apart. 7
Finally, the theorisation of the grounds of human solidarity has been given
fresh impetus by responses to the Holocaust. Jürgen Habermas has suggested
on more than one occasion that both his ethical theory and his vision of a
German/European future are unavoidably rooted in the events of the Holocaust
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