Social Theory After the Holocaust

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does not prohibit but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a
very great seismic force’. 8
Now, Arendt also speaks of the ‘explosion’ of our categories of thought and
standards of judgement when confronted by the Holocaust, but the conclusion
she draws is not the same. Consider one key example of this ‘rupture’ which she
offers: that of the impossibility of applying a ‘means–ends’ calculus to the
phenomena of totalitarian terror. In the conventional use of terror, she argues
in ‘Understanding and Politics’, violence is exercised as a means either to retain
power, or to intimidate enemies, or to force people to work. But in circumstances
where opposition has already become impossible, where it does not make a jot
of difference what I do for my fate is already sealed, and where the exploitation
of labour is at most only a secondary benefit subordinate to the main goal of
extermination, such rationales make little sense. In the totalitarian use of terror,
violence ceases to be a means to an end; it is deprived of that element of rational
calculation which governs its exercise even in the worst of states; it becomes
instead the very essence of rule and ends up, as it did in the Holocaust, in a
‘frenzy of destruction’ without political, economic or military utility. 9
If this characterisation of totalitarian terror is correct, then Arendt’s point is
that categories of thought and standards of judgement which presuppose an
element of rational choice on the part of social actors are stretched beyond their
limit in the attempt to understand such phenomena. In an earlier essay on ‘Social
Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’ (1950) Arendt
explores this issue from its other side – that of the appearance of the impossibility
of human understanding – when she writes as follows:
If we assume that most of our actions are of a utilitarian nature and that our
evil deeds spring from some ‘exaggeration’ of self-interest, then we are forced
to conclude that this particular institution of totalitarianism is beyond human
understanding… it is not only the non-utilitarian character of the camps
themselves – the senselessness of ‘punishing’ completely innocent people, the
failure to keep them in a condition so that profitable work might be extorted
from them, the superfluousness of frightening a completely subdued
population – which gives them their distinctive and disturbing qualities, but
their anti-utilitarian function, the fact that not even the supreme emergencies
of military activities were allowed to interfere with these ‘demographic
policies’. It was as though the Nazis were convinced that it was of greater
importance to run extermination factories than to win the war. 10
Arendt did not share the view that the death camps were ‘beyond human
understanding’. Rather, her argument is that it is only because we have a
restrictively rationalistic model of human action that the death camps appear to
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