ABSTRACT
Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) was the book that launched Zygmunt Bauman's intellectual career. The Holocaust was a direct consequence of the Prussianised Weberian bureaucracy. Bauman argues that within modernity there developed the gardening state that separates wanted from unwanted elements within the society. Bauman's conception of anti-Semitism not only predates modernity, but is the product of an external power that exercises constraint on the gardener, shaping the gardener's choices on who and what constitutes the weeds and what constitutes the good design for the well-ordered society. The Holocaust is described by Bauman as an event of, arguably, the most dramatic moral significance. The Holocaust did not just, mysteriously, avoid clash with the social norms and institutions of modernity. The division of labour within the Holocaust process meant that individuals were carrying out individual acts that in themselves raised no serious moral concerns: digging coal, driving trains etc.
