Undergraduate Module Descriptor

SOC3046: The Holocaust and Society

This module descriptor refers to the 2018/9 academic year.

Module Content

Syllabus Plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

1.Introduction & orientation: Why study the Holocaust?
2.Uniqueness and comprehensibility: Was the Holocaust a unique event?
3 Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Modernity thesis: was the Holocaust an essentially modern phenomenon?
4 The nature of evil: Radical or Banal?
5 Social psychology: situationist explanation and the fundamental attributional error
6 Explaining direct perpetrators' actions and motivations: Browning's situationist explanation
7 Explaining direct perpetrators' actions and motivations: Goldhagen's cognitive explanation
8 Rescue and resistance: supererogation, ordinary goodness and the social conditions of altruism.
9 Normalisation of the Holocaust? Comparison & analogy with other genocides and putative cases of social wrong- and evil-doing
10 Knowledge, ignorance and responsibility
11 Judgement and understanding: compatible or incompatible?

Learning and Teaching

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
23	127	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning and Teaching activity	16.5	11 x 1.5 hour lectures
Scheduled Learning and Teaching activity	5	5 x fortnightly 1 hour smaller group seminars
Scheduled Learning and Teaching activities	1.5	Revision session
Guided independent study	47	Assigned readings associated with each lecture
Guided independent study	40	Preparation for essay
Guided Independent Study	40	Preparation for exam

Online Resources

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).

ELE – http://vle.exeter.ac.uk/

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

H. Arendt (1965) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil
Z. Bauman (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust
C. Browning (1992) Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland
E. Garrard & G. Scarre (eds) (2003) Moral philosophy and the Holocaust
D. Goldhagen (1997) Hitler's willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
R. Hilberg (1961; 1985) The destruction of the European Jews
D. Jones (1999) Moral responsibility in the Holocaust: A study in the ethics of character
B. Schlink (1998) The Reader
A. Vetlesen (2005) Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing