Modern Europe was shaped by the 18th-century Enlightenment, which dreamt of reason and science, technology, democracy, national sovereignty, the free market, and a society based on individual rights and freedoms. Was the holocaust the great aberration of this dream? Believers in the Enlightenment idea – which continues to define modernity worldwide – would say so: a devastating violation.
But this summer, as I walked through the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and museum, observing the engineering precision of the gas chambers and the giant shafts that aligned them with the furnaces meant to suck in the dead bodies and char them into ashes; as I stood before the glass walls encasing heaps of smoothly shorn hair of the heads of the soon-to-be-executed victims and the piles and piles of empty cans of Zyklon-B that were used to gas them, it was the far more chilling explanation of the genocide that returned to me. In this worldview, the holocaust was the natural and inevitable conclusion to the Enlightenment.
For some philosophers of the Frankfurt school, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Enlightenment aspired to a kind of instrumental reason and technological precision that shaped a cold, calculating approach where human beings were objects of administrative...