Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing

This book investigates the phenomenon that has become a landmark of the past century, the phenomenon of collective evil, in an attempt to construct an explanatory conceptual framework that would acknowledge the heterogeneity of this occurrence and not reduce it to a singular cause. The underlying philosophical assumption of this inquiry is acknowledgement to evil, individual as well as collective, of positive ontological status, in contrast to the mainly theologically-grounded denial of ontological substance to evil, the understanding of evil as an absence or lack of good rather than a presence itself (p. 59). The main argument thus relates evil to the existential, arguably ontological, vulnerability of human beings and the subject’s dependence upon others, which can, however, be encouraged, exploited, manipulated and instrumentalized in specific socio-historical circumstances for the purposes of collective evildoing. The book is divided into three main parts or levels. The first level, composed of the first three chapters, is Vetlesen’s conceptual inquiry into three different theories of evil: sociological (Zygmunt Bauman), philosophical (Hannah Arendt) and psychological (Fred Alford). In the second level, Vetlesen brings into this conceptual discussion a recent example of collective evildoing – atrocities committed in Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s. Through the conceptual investigation and historical analysis, Vetlesen finally arrives at the normative theory of human agency in the third level of the book. In Chapter 1, Vetlesen engages in a critical reading of Bauman’s theory of collective evildoing as an offspring of the dehumanizing project of modernity. He finds Bauman’s main argument on evil, as a consequence of distantiation of one group from the other, through which the victim-group is deprived of humanness and hence rendered unworthy of humane treatment, problematic when confronted with historical evidence from the Holocaust on which it is based but also through the more recent cases of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, when proximity never did generate ethical impulse in the perpetrators but was in fact what aggravated the atrocities. The distantiation argument is grounded in Bauman’s thesis that collective evil is a product of modernity – sterile, inhuman, highly organized as these crimes were, they are seen by Bauman as flowing directly out of modern bureaucratic structures and dominant instrumental rationality. Vetlesen finds this debatable on historical account, as the evidence suggests that ‘the Nazi regime parasitically and progressively transformed and (even) revolutionized the institutional apparatus it had inherited from the democratic Weimar era’ (p. 44). Pursuing it further, however, Vetlesen demonstrates that the analysis is problematic also conceptually since Bauman presumes the equation of totalitarian regimes and modern society, neglecting the important pluralistic tendencies in modernity. The outcome is, Vetlesen concludes, a highly depsychologized sociological account of collective evil as a product of ideologized institutional structures which ignores the fact European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 559–563