Chapter 4: Colonialism, National-Socialism and the Holocaust: On modern ways of dealing with deviance

Résumé En

The central question of this chapter is about socio-historical implications of colonialism for ways of dealing with deviance in the metropoles. Postcolonial studies metaphorically talk about the colonies as “laboratories” of modern societies. Indeed, a series of political reforms and interventions aiming at society as a whole or, to put it more strongly, at creating the “ideal society”, have been experimented with in the colonies. The historical development of the European metropole was heavily affected by the colonial experience (either simultaneously or with some time-delay), an insight that leads to rejecting any assumption of a uni-directional “modernisation”-flow.We will see that there are obvious continuities in terms of social thought. Concrete connections between organizational, institutional and juridical forms of dealing with deviance are more difficult to describe in clear-cut terms, if we do not want to fall into simplistic accounts of a complex story. In the conclusion, we will have to reconsider Baumann’s claim that the Holocaust has to be understood as the product of modern society and of a highly developed civilization.