Holocaust Ends-Based Rationality Analysis

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To Weber’s critics and supporters alike, the Holocaust serves as an example of the negative consequences of the means based reality of bureaucracy. To further explore this assertion, the mid-twentieth century mass genocide can be evaluated with both an ends-based rationality and Weber’s means-based rationality.
An ends-based rationality, in layman’s terms, means that we evaluate the ends of actions taken. This evaluation comes from judging the rationality of the goals, or ends, being pursued by an organization such as the Nazi Party. The stage for the Holocaust was set as Hitler and his party gained momentum in the country, utilizing anti semitism as a strategy for political control. The Jews functioned as a scapegoat for Germany’s failures, such as the economic crisis the country suffered after losing World War I. The end-goal of the Holocaust was Hitler’s “Final Solution”: the mass extermination of European Jews. To kill another person is irrational to many; to kill six million even more so. To pin Germany’s shortcomings on a very specific portion of society and subjecting them to concentration camps such as Auschwitz as some sort of retribution is now widely viewed as being preposterous. According to an ends-based rationality, the Holocaust was incredibly …show more content…

According to an ends-based rationality, the Holocaust was an extremely irrational event that is connected to the unrealistic goal of exterminating all Jews. Conversely, Weber’s means-based rationality suggests that the Holocaust was rational because the Nazis ran their camps optimally. This particular concept is extremely problematic in that it justifies the mass genocide on the basis of the camp’s functionality in economic terms. Although very different, the two types of rationality explain how organizations such as the Nazi Party and the bureaucracy can create lasting

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