Sociology Without Politics: The Ideological Quietism of Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society

There is a peculiar irony in the state of contemporary Holocaust historiography. Never have historians had access to such vast archives, such rich personal testimonies, such forensic detail about the machinery of extermination. And yet never has the dominant interpretive framework been so politically anaemic, so determined to dissolve the catastrophe of fascism into a fog of social psychology, conformity, and “ordinary people.” The latest and most ambitious expression of this trend is Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), a 500‑page monument to empirical industry organised around a concept that, for all its descriptive power, cannot explain the historical process it purports to illuminate.

Fulbrook is an indefatigable researcher. Her use of the 1939 Harvard “My Life in Germany” essays- hundreds of submissions by Jewish émigrés reflecting on the tightening noose of Nazi rule- is exemplary. Her reconstruction of the “muddled middle,” the vast majority of Germans who neither joined the Nazi movement nor resisted it, is detailed, humane, and often moving. She insists, correctly, that complicity came in degrees, that behaviour shifted with circumstance, and that the boundaries of the sayable and the doable narrowed year by year as the regime consolidated power.

But the very honesty of her empirical work exposes the poverty of the framework into which it is forced. Fulbrook’s “bystander society” is not an explanation. It is a sociological description masquerading as one. It tells us how Germans learned to look away. It does not explain why German society reorganised itself so that looking away became the dominant social mode. It catalogues the symptoms of atomisation while refusing to analyse the political and economic processes that produced it. This refusal is not accidental. It is ideological.

The Missing Premise: Fascism as a Class Phenomenon

The catastrophe that overtook Germany after 1933 was not the spontaneous eruption of a national psychology of conformity. It resulted from a definite political process rooted in the crisis of German and world capitalism after 1929. The decisive fact, without which no serious analysis of Nazism is possible, is that the German working class, the most organised and politically conscious in Europe, was defeated and destroyed as an independent force before Hitler ever entered the Chancellery.

Between 1930 and 1933, Trotsky wrote with a clarity unmatched by any historian since. Fascism, he insisted, was not a cultural pathology but a political instrument: the mobilisation of the most reactionary sections of finance capital to smash the organisations of the working class once and for all. The Social Democratic Party’s policy of “the lesser evil”, supporting Brüning, tolerating Papen, paralysing the proletariat with constitutional illusions, combined with the Stalinised Communist Party’s lunatic theory of “social fascism”, opened the door to a victory that was never inevitable. The German labour movement was not defeated by conformity. Its own leadership defeated it.

Fulbrook’s book says nothing about any of this. Her “muddled middle” floats free of class, free of the relations of production, free of the political struggles that determined the fate of the nation. It is an undifferentiated social mass whose behaviour is explained by reference to social pressure, fear, and the desire to “get on with things.” In this schema, the destruction of the trade unions, the outlawing of the SPD and KPD, the smashing of working‑class organisations, all of which occurred within months of Hitler’s appointment, appear not as the precondition for the emergence of a “bystander society” but as mere background noise. This is not simply an omission. It is a methodological abdication.

Even sympathetic reviewers have noticed the circularity. Dan Stone, writing in History Today, observes that Fulbrook’s own evidence undermines her emphasis: if the compliance of “the many” only became politically decisive because of the organised initiative and violence of the Nazi leadership, then the analytical weight belongs with the regime and the social forces that installed it, not with the sociology of the crowd.

A materialist analysis goes further. It asks: Which social classes did the Nazi regime serve? Whose profits were built on Aryanisation, rearmament, and slave labour? How was German society atomised so thoroughly that Fulbrook’s “bystanders” became possible? What political defeat made this atomisation possible? These questions are not optional. They are the foundation of any explanation of fascism. Without them, one is left with a morality tale about conformity, fear, and the “ordinary German”, a tale that is comforting precisely because it is politically empty.

Fulbrook’s turn toward contemporary analogiesDerek Chauvin, Trump, election denialism- is not merely misguided. It is symptomatic. It reveals the extent to which the sociological turn has abandoned historical specificity in favour of a generalised, de‑politicised account of authoritarianism as a psychological tendency.

This flattening of history is everywhere today. The resurgence of the far right is treated as a problem of intolerance, bigotry, and crowd psychology rather than as the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism and the political bankruptcy of the organisations that once claimed to represent the working class. The political economy of fascism is replaced by the sociology of “ordinary people.” The class struggle disappears, replaced by the therapeutic language of “bystanders,” “upstanders,” and “moral courage.”This is not scholarship. It is ideology in the service of liberal despair.

From Browning to Fulbrook: The Rise and Exhaustion of the “Ordinary People” Paradigm

In Holocaust historiography, few interpretive shifts have been as influential or politically calming as the move toward the “ordinary people” perspective. Over the past thirty years, a common argument has emerged that shifts the explanation for fascist violence from political economy and class struggle to individual behavior, psychology, and moral choices of the general population. Works like Christopher Browning’s ‘Ordinary Men’ (1992), Daniel Goldhagen’s ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ (1996), and Mary Fulbrook’s ‘Bystander Society’ (2023) outline a coherent though broad lineage of this perspective.

Browning’s book was the first major articulation of the model. His study of Reserve Police Battalion 101middle‑aged, working‑class men from Hamburg who became mass shooters in Poland- was careful, archival, and modest in its claims. Browning argued that situational pressures, obedience, conformity, and the dynamics of group behaviour explained how “ordinary men” became killers. He rejected cultural essentialism and insisted on contingency. But the conceptual move was decisive: the explanation of genocide was relocated from the structural crisis of German capitalism and the destruction of the labour movement to the psychology of average individuals placed under extreme conditions.

Goldhagen radicalised this move into a polemical thesis. For him, the killers were not merely ordinary; they were the expression of a timeless German “eliminationist antisemitism.” The genocide was not a political project but a cultural destiny. Goldhagen’s book was rightly criticised for its essentialism, its disregard for class, and its flattening of German society into a single murderous will. Yet even his critics accepted the basic displacement: the centre of gravity lay with the attitudes of the many, not with the political forces that shaped the regime.

Fulbrook represents the latest and most sophisticated iteration of this paradigm. She rejects Goldhagen’s essentialism and Browning’s focus on perpetrators, turning instead to the “muddled middle”, the millions who neither resisted nor actively participated. Her concept of a “bystander society” is sociologically rich: she traces how German social life was reorganised so that looking away became normal, safe, and structurally reinforced. But the explanatory frame remains the same. The decisive terrain is still the behaviour of ordinary people, not the political defeat of the working class, the crisis of capitalism, or the role of finance capital in installing and sustaining the Nazi regime.

Across these works, the pattern is unmistakable. The political economy of fascism disappears. The destruction of the SPD and KPD, the smashing of trade unions, the paralysis produced by Social Democratic “lesser evilism” and Stalinist “social fascism” all of this recedes into background noise. What remains is a vast literature on conformity, obedience, fear, and moral choice. The catastrophe becomes a morality tale about human behaviour rather than a historically determinate outcome of class struggle in a society convulsed by crisis.

The “ordinary people” paradigm has produced important empirical work, but its intellectual cost has been enormous. It describes everything and explains nothing. It catalogues how people acted under dictatorship while refusing to analyse why the dictatorship existed, whom it served, and what political defeats made its social order possible. In this sense, Fulbrook’s Bystander Society is not a break with Browning or Goldhagen but their culmination: a meticulous, humane, politically weightless account of a society whose passivity was itself the product of forces her framework cannot name.

The question is not why Germans looked away. The question is why German society was reorganised so that looking away became the only safe option. The answer does not lie in conformity. It lies in the defeat of the working class, the crisis of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie's mobilisation for counter‑revolution.

Until historians confront that reality, they will continue to produce vast, meticulous, politically weightless studies of behaviour under dictatorship- studies that describe everything and explain nothing.

Further Reading

Primary Works by Mary Fulbrook

• Fulbrook, Mary. Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Fulbrook, Mary. Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Fulbrook, Mary. A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Key Works in the “Ordinary People” Paradigm

• Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Foundational study of perpetrator behaviour under situational pressures.
• Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Cultural‑essentialist thesis positing a uniquely German “eliminationist antisemitism.”

Major Historiographical Interventions

• Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Classic survey of intentionalist, functionalist, and social‑historical approaches.
• Stargardt, Nicholas. The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945. London: Bodley Head, 2015. Influential social history of German wartime attitudes.
• Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. 2 vols. New York: HarperCollins, 1997–2007. Essential narrative integrating ideology, policy, and victim experience.

Marxist Analyses of Fascism and the German Working Class

• Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971. The most precise contemporary analysis of fascism as a class instrument of finance capital.
• Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918–1923. London: Bookmarks, 1982. On the revolutionary crisis that shaped the later defeat of the German working class.
• Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Leiden: Brill, 2005. A comprehensive Marxist account of the missed revolutionary opportunities.
• Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Not Marxist, but indispensable for understanding fascism as a political process rather than a cultural pathology.

Critical Responses to Goldhagen and the Sociological Turn

• Bartov, Omer. “Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories.” History and Memory 9, no. 1–2 (1997): 162–188.
• Evans, Richard J. In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past. London: I.B. Tauris, 1989.
• Finkelstein, Norman G., and Ruth Bettina Birn. A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. The most sustained critique of Goldhagen’s essentialist claims.

Contemporary Reviews of Fulbrook’s Bystander Society

• Stone, Dan. Review of Bystander Society, History Today, 2024. Notes the circularity of Fulbrook’s framework and the analytical weight carried by the Nazi leadership rather than the “muddled middle.”
• Kershaw, Ian. Review in The Times Literary Supplement, 2024. Praises Fulbrook’s archival work while questioning the explanatory reach of the “bystander” category.

Contextual Works on German Society and Capitalism

• Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. A major study of the economic foundations of the Nazi regime.
• Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. London: Penguin, 2003. A detailed narrative of the political collapse of Weimar and the rise of Nazism.
• Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. A critique of culturalist explanations of German authoritarianism.