The wilful, planned, systematic extermination-not subjugation-of whole populations is a Novum of the twentieth century. Late modernity has been characterised by frequent outbreaks of mass murder organised by the modern state. While the administrative murder of masses of people planned and executed by the apparatus of the modern state is certainly indicative of a proclivity to genocide, it is not yet genocide itself. The term genocide must be restricted to those situations in which the object of state policy is the extermination, the complete annihilation, of a determinate group of the population. It is the Holocaust that constitutes the primary example of genocide in our epoch, in that the destruction of the Jews as a people became endemic to the evolving socioeconomic, political and cultural matrix. With the Holocaust, mankind stepped into an incipient genocidal universe in which the systematic, bureaucratically administered destruction of millions of citizens or subject people was becoming an integral and normal part of the operation of the state apparatus. A genocidal universe is a social constellation in which genocide becomes constitutive of a culture, a central feature of a civilisation, which integrates, propels and shapes the socio-political network in which the administrative murder of whole peoples and strata of the population occurs. In such a genocidal universe, the potential for the extermination of whole groups of the population is integrally linked to the very social structure itself. In this sense, the Holocaust was the clearest portent of such a genocidal universe that humankind has experienced thus far. Given the epoch-making character of the Holocaust, given the significance of the eruption of the genocidal universe as a potential inherent in modernity, it is surprising that, with very few exceptions, philosophy and social theory have not really probed the importance of these transformational events. As a result, the Holocaust, with its train of horrors, remains to this day an ‘unmastered past’, in the compelling view of Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1977, p. 283). This is all the more disturbing in that one of the classic functions of philosophy and social theory is to grasp the meaning of historic events and transformations, and to define their impact for the present and future of society. Philosophy and social theory need to develop a conceptual framework that will integrate and synthesise the various and seemingly disparate aspects of the genocidal events of World War Two and incorporate them within the ambit of a theory of modernity. These events, horrible and unprecedented though they were, are not inexplicable aberrations, surds. As one of us has argued elsewhere: