ABSTRACT
The intention of this paper is to vindicate the historical sociology of genocide. This project demonstrates important continuities as well as discontinuities in the history of genocide. These findings call into question the thesis of Zygmunt Bauman that the modernity of the Holocaust challenges orthodox approaches to the sociology of morality and politics. While the Holocaust undoubtedly manifested distinctive features of modern society, it also reproduced ancient motivational and structural sources of genocide. What follows from this analysis is not, as Bauman argues, a radical critique of modern civilization, but a clearer view of the interrelations between the constructive and destructive features of all civilizations. If modernity produced the Holocaust, it also produced the sociological and moral critique of genocide.
