EXCERPT: In The Dialectics of disaster: A Preface to Hope, I analyzed the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem" as an act of societal madness. We ordinarily use the term "madness" quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study--perhaps in trying to be more precise, objective, or scientific, perhaps to avoid a contentious descriptive term.

I would argue, however, that sophisticated thought has ignored an important spontaneous insight. Used carefully and self-consciously, the term "madness" illuminates much of the century's genocidal history, including above all the Nazi project to exterminate Europe's Jews.

The rigorous use of "madness" is deeply disturbing, of course, which is perhaps one reason why it has been so conspicuously avoided in a century so rife with madness. The functionalist bias of most systematic thought assumes that there is a reason for every societal act, a more or less rational intention behind political action. It offends the intellect to suggest that there is no reason behind a major policy--or that indeed its reason is profoundly and systematically irrational.

"Madness" is even more unsettling in suggesting that we may be living amidst a profound and destructive irrationality, one which lies beyond the traditionally understood irrationalities of history--those of mad individual leaders, for example, or of irrational class societies in a state of crisis. Moreover, our conventional political sense is deeply troubled by ascriptions of such madness: what political countermeasures will move the crazy leaders of mad societies? To describe a major social policy as "mad" and to suggest that it is rooted in fundamental societal dynamics is to rule out the hope of simple reforms improving the situation, of leaders seeing the light.