Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
The American Review of Public Administration
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Russell, N.
Right arrow Articles by Gregory, R.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Making the Undoable Doable

Milgram, the Holocaust, and Modern Government

Nestar Russell

Robert Gregory

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

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."

Key Words: Milgram • Holocaust • bureaucratic authority • dehumanization • individual responsibility

The American Review of Public Administration, Vol. 35, No. 4, 327-349 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0275074005278511
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?