Abstract
The link between Stanley Milgram's experimental study of obedience in 1963 and the explanation of the Holocaust during the Second World War has been the subject of controversy for the past five decades. Russell and Gregory (2015) offer the latest reflections on this relationship. Hannah Arendt's analysis of Eichmann centred on the image of desk murderers mindlessly processing military orders. Milgram invoked pervasive evidence of compliance to morally reprehensible commands in his experimental study of obedience. The joint Arendt–Milgram perspective has recently fallen into disrespect as a result of voluntarism evidenced in recent studies of ordinary Germans in participation in mass murder. Russell and Gregory's contribution advances an essentially Weberian explanation for the behaviour of perpetrators. Their analysis of the obedience experiments concludes that all the participants were constrained by a normative structure that led them to ignore harm to subjects as a result of the larger bureaucratic mindset that allowed Milgram's assistants, his funders and his subjects to suppress acknowledgement of injury. They argue that this recapitulates key features of the Holocaust. The recent historiography of the Holocaust points to a post-Weberian understanding of the bureaucracies at the heart of the genocide – the slave labour program in Germany and German-occupied territory, and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, where evidence points to a conscious and enthusiastic endorsement of the homicidal objectives of the Nazi regime.
Highlights
A Bureaucratic Holocaust – Towards a New Consensus”, in G.D
The growth of knowledge in respect of genocide will not be advanced by returning to a half-century old, admittedly daring and provocative experiment conducted in Yale under the aegis of studying obedience
Lubek and Radtke (1998: 162) argued that the professional subtext of the ethical and scientific controversies raised by the OTA experiments was the need to valorize experimental methodology to validate claims about people and society, essentially to promote “the importance and necessity of experimental social psychological research.”
Summary
Many genocide scholars have noted that Milgram’s experimental work on obedience became paired with Hannah Arendt’s simultaneous coverage of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem for his role in the mass murder and enslavement of European Jews, and seemed to provide empirical verification for her “banality of evil” thesis (Miller 2004a: 11). Friend”; “the Brilliant Book that ignited a controversy on the Eichmann potential in America – obedience to orders, as American as cherry pie. Milgram contributed stories on destructive obedience widely in popular magazines, and appeared on NBC 60 Minutes in 1979 where he claimed controversially that a Nazi concentration camp could be readily staffed from ordinary people from any small town in America. This shifted the venue for discussion of the M-H link to popular culture. None of this popularity diminished Diana Baumrind’s ethical critique, nor Martin Orne’s methodological criticisms
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