ABSTRACT
Barbarism is inherent in modernity; it epitomizes the dark side of modernity. Modernity bore within itself not only the various great visions of emancipation or the great promises of continuous self-correction and expansion, but also very destructive possibilities—violence, aggression, war, and genocide. Barbarism is rooted in some basic characteristics of human nature, in the construction of human society and culture, of social order, and above all in the ambivalence to social order which is inherent in its very construction. The Holocaust has been the most extreme manifestation and symbol of the negative, destructive potentialities of modernity, of the barbarism lurking within the very core of modernity. The creation of such boundaries entails both constructive and destructive possibilities. The core of the political program of modernity was the breakdown of traditional legitimization of the political order, the concomitant opening up of different possibilities of construction of such order, and contesting the ways in which political order was to be constructed.
