ABSTRACT
Sociologists have so far failed to explore in full the consequences of the Holocaust for the extant model of modern civilization and the logic of the civilizing process. While some attention has been paid to illuminating selected aspects of the Holocaust by the application of available sociological concepts, the possibility that the Holocaust experience demands a substantive re-thinking of the concepts themselves has not been seriously considered. Such an omission is as regrettable as it is dangerous, in as far as the historical study of the Holocaust has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Nazi-perpetrated genocide was a legitimate outcome of rational bureaucratic culture. This fact suggests the need of important corrections to our understanding of the historical tendency of modern society, as it reveals certain potentialities of modern rationality which are not visible, or not salient enough, under normal conditions. The one posthumous service the Holocaust can render is to serve as the laboratory in which those potentialities can be observed and investigated. Among the processes which the Holocaust brought into relief and allowed to explore, the rarely discussed function of the civilizing process as that of the social production of moral indifference, and the social production of moral invisibility, deserves particularly close attention.
