Making the Undoable Doable

Abstract

This article interprets Stanley Milgram's laboratory experiments on obedience, and their significance in understanding the Holocaust and the ways by which governmental systems enable people to do things they would otherwise find undoable. Milgram tended to conflate “proximity”—between participants and learners—and sensory perception, and overlooked the difference between physical and emotional distance. Neither Milgram nor his commentators have fully recognized the importance of the shock generator in these experiments. Milgram's paradigm shows why the Nazis' search for increasingly “productive” killing means, which minimized levels of sensory perception among immediate perpetrators, was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of the Holocaust. Milgram's key concept of “the agentic state” is reinterpreted as an act of moral choice, rather than as a psychological state of mind. An understanding of the conditional nature of legal-rational (bureaucratic) authority is essential if ways are to be found of resolving “the paradox of modernity.”