A sociological history of the moral construction of universal evil

Jeffrey C. Alexander on the Holocaust

Jeffrey C. Alexander is a sociology professor at Yale who wrote this very long essay on the social construction of the Holocaust as the universal evil and published it in 2002.

Here is a link to Alexander’s On the Social Construction of Moral Evils.

It lays out a history of a progressive narrative was formed around the Nazi Atrocities, American anti-anti-semitism and then the gradual emergence during the latter stages of the Cold War, of the idea of the Holocaust. Alexander is a fascinating, irreverent, conservative thinker. He doesn’t mention the association of Jews with Leftists for instance, but he does deal with the entry into the public sphere of Jewish advocacy groups between 1945-1947 all in the name of tolerance, anti-anti-semitism, anti-atrocity, anti-fascist agitation that became part of American post-war identity and its commitment to a universal moral field of action.

I think it offers some interesting context for our reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, during this initial period of American optimism about its anti-anti-semitic mission in the world. I’m going to go through some of Alexander’s historicization in another, but I thought I would put this out there for interested

I just read Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry. Alexander is approaching rather obliquely the idea of a the instrumentalization of the Holocaust in a progressive narrative, but Finkelstein is much more direct about what he decries as an industry led by professional “survivors” like Elie Wiesel that desecrates the memory of his parents, who espoused views of a universalist, progressive nature that fits into the 1945-1947 model of American and Jewish high liberalism identified by Alexander.

Happy reading for those who want to go down this path. I’m getting ready to start writing Chapter 4 of the book on trauma culture and all the working titles are doozies: “Holocaust, Oprah, Yale” is one I’m toying with.