is political science producing technically competent barbarians?
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bstract In a speech to the German Bundestag in 1998, the well-known Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer stressed the role of intellectual elites and especially university professors in making the Holocaust possible. To this, he added the question: ‘If we have indeed learnt anything, it is whether we do not still keep producing technically competent barbarians in our universities’. This article is a reflection on the implications of this question for presentday teaching and research in political science.
Keywords
holocaust; academics; political science; rational choice
ACADEMICS AS PERPETRATORS?
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ometimes when I read things, I come across an argument that strikes me directly.1 It is the kind of formulation that instantly makes one think in a completely new and different way. This time, it was something that made me rethink what I do in my day-today work as a teacher of political science. The argument is taken from the last chapter of a truly magnificent book written by Professor Yehuda Bauer (2001), entitled Rethinking the Holocaust, which contains a lecture that Bauer gave to the German Bundestag on 27 January 1998. The same lecture was, I believe, also delivered later to the special conference
on the Holocaust organised by the Swedish government in Stockholm in January 2000. In his talk, Bauer tries to summarise the ‘state-of-the-art’ when it comes to explaining the Holocaust. Yehuda Bauer is one of the most established and respected researchers in this particular field. He has been the Director of the Yad Vashem Research Institute, devoted to the Holocaust, in Israel, and he has published some of the most well-known books and articles in this field (Bauer, 1996a,b; Bauer and Keren, 2001). As a scholar, he has been at the centre of the remarkable resurgence of Holocaust research that has taken place since the mid-1980s, not least as an editor of the journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. european political science: 4 2005
(3 – 13) & 2005 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/05 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
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In the aforementioned chapter, Bauer tries to summarise what he has learnt from a lifetime devoted to the study of this huge and difficult topic. The starting point is that there is no final explanation for the final solution, and there probably never will be. On the contrary, there is still a fierce debate over how the Holocaust should be explained, assuming it is possible to explain it at all. Bauer, for his part, argues that, as with all other historical events, the Holocaust is, in principle, amenable to explanation (Bauer, 2001). An excellent overview of the many different explanations that have been put forward is given by Ron Rosenbaum (1998) in his fascinating book, Explaining Hitler, in which Bauer is interviewed together with many other well-known scholars in this field. Just to name a few: psychologists have focused on Hitler ‘the person’ and have tried to find explanations in his psyche, pointing to the importance of the mentality of this single individual, or, as another
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