American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay by Adele Valeria Messina (review)

In 2007, Judith Gerson and Diane Wolf wrote that studying the Holocaust from the perspective of sociology was akin to wandering in the desert. Adele Valeria Messina’s new book, American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay, provides a close topography of that desert, uncovering forms of early life and the harsh conditions that inhibited growth. Metaphors aside, this comprehensive volume tracks the precise historical and political factors that shaped seven decades of American sociological thought on Nazism and the Holocaust, offering new insight into the notion of a “sociological delay.”

The book’s four dense chapters are arranged chronologically, presenting a rich compendium of Holocaust-related sociological scholarship. In each chapter, Messina effectively uses a historiographical narrative to explore the field’s inconsistent level of attention to Nazism, racism, and the extermination of the Jews. Chapter One points to the postwar political environment and long-standing prejudices within the academy that led to the marginalization of Holocaust-related research by the establishment, now called the “sociological delay.” Chapter Two starts in the early 1970s and connects American sociology’s newfound interest in Nazi extermination camps to growing national discourse on the Holocaust, as well as to political events including the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War. The third chapter reviews 1980s sociological theory on the “genocidal state,” suggesting that it was prompted in part by atrocities occurring against the Maya Indians, Sikh, and Burundians that decade. The last chapter begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ends at the present moment, situating American sociology at the fulcrum of interdisciplinary Holocaust studies. In this history of the sociology of the Holocaust, Messina reveals that there were, in fact, sociologists writing about Nazi atrocities all along.

Most intriguing is the author’s discussion of the eminent sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett C. Hughes, who in 1948 both shied away from publishing research on Nazism. Messina shows that Parsons’ abrupt disinterest coincided with his trip to Allied-occupied Germany and the establishment of the Harvard Russian Research Center (HRRC). She revisits the controversy around Parsons’s supposed role in the resettlement of Nazi sympathizers and considers whether the unexplained murder of Parsons’ colleague, Edward Hartshorne, Jr., a fellow sociologist and staunch anti-Nazi, influenced the direction of Parsons’s research. Parsons’ place in sociology cannot be overemphasized: as president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1949, he secured funding for its re-establishment and then served as its secretary from 1962 to 1965. He was the founder and director of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, where he advised dozens of future sociology professors and developed his ideas around structural functionalism. It is no wonder that Parsons’s “values free” sociology avoided a close examination of racial prejudice when ideas of American exceptionalism and fears of communism prevailed.

In the first chapter, Messina also questions Everett C. Hughes’s 1948 decision to halt publication of his essay on Nazi violence called “Good People and Dirty Work.” Hughes, serving as editor of the American Journal of Sociology from 1952 to 1961 and as president of the ASA in 1963, knew that if he published this work in 1948, his funding would likely be jeopardized. In analyzing Parsons’s and Hughes’s actions that year, the author pinpoints the roots of the sociology establishment’s delay in engaging with the Holocaust. Messina writes that studying this era is “useful for understanding the status of sociologists from a ‘wider perspective,’ that is, when academic research is not free and unfettered, but rather conditioned by political intentions. Briefly, the main American universities, as with the HRRC, could not deal with the Holocaust theme, which concerned a matter of accountability and a very recent event calling for political accountabilities or for a kind of public admission of guilt...