Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

An earlier generation of social scientists had traced the answer to the peculiarities of German character—conventionalism, submissiveness, ethnocentrism, and other proto-fascist traits catalogued in studies such as The Authoritarian Personality, an influential 1950 book coauthored by the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. Bauman argued that the focus on these personality traits obscured the social and institutional arrangements that made it frighteningly easy for citizens not only in Nazi Germany but in all modern states to transgress the boundaries of conventional morality—to perpetrate crimes they would never dream of committing in their private lives—without feeling responsible for their acts. What made this possible was one of the most celebrated achievements of modernity, he claimed, the emergence of bureaucratic organizations guided by instrumental rationality that turned individuals into specialized functionaries who were trained to focus narrowly on “the job to be done” while putting their moral concerns aside.