and so amenable to marking a diversity of acts and relationships; what it is, in other words, that people think is at stake when they declare that something unexpected is in fact “violence.” Here a caveat is important: what follows is not a proper intellectual history that traces in detail threads of thought through various philosophical “schools”—it is an attempt to gesture at what I think are key moments in this history when certain conceptual doors were opened up. Once these doors were opened, other thinkers—sometimes with irreconcilable ideas and commitments—often walked through them. The second part of this chapter attempts to cleave from this mass of literature a few central, threading concepts that might support some sort of rigorous cross-cultural application, differentiating what might be of broad methodological applicability from what should remain historically contingent. In this part I turn back to the world of the papyri and to their particular language of complaint, as well as to the distinction between force and violence, in an effort to better understand the force of the label of violence (pun intended) within these categories.
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A genealogy of the concept of violence, or at least of violence as a sociologically significant concept, should begin with Max Weber. There are two reasons for beginning with Weber, one historical and the other linguistic. The historical point is the easier one: Weber’s thesis, variously expressed, that the modern state successfully claims a monopoly on “the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” has proven fruitful in the social sciences generally, so much so that even though it is often subject to critique from a variety of perspectives it remains a pithy and original formulation. The difficulties inherent in Weber’s thesis—that even modern states often fail to control territories effectively, that they often delegate their monopoly unwillingly, that premodern and modern state-building projects differ in aims and scope, that legitimacy is often up for grabs, that force is not always or necessarily physical—need not detain us here. The more important matter for the comparative study of violence is linguistic: Weber uses a single, ethically neutral term (Gewalt) for violence. Contemporary discussions, especially in sociology and political science, of “state violence,” “legitimate violence,” or the “monopoly on violence” that translate the German terms (staatliche Gewalt, Gewaltmonopol) are still deeply influenced, methodologically speaking, by the ethical ambivalence of the original term.26 Yet this ethical neutrality is hard to translate into English, in which we tend to make a distinction between violence and force—the former being unjustified, the latter ethically neutral or at least unsuspicious. That Weber’s Gewalt can be and has been translated both ways should make us alert to the agenda of the broader historiography of violence.27 While it may be useful for large-scale sociological comparison to rid ourselves of this distinction between force and violence (or even between legitimate and illegitimate force),28 failing to be alert to the ethical position of those who choose to write about violence (instead of force, or vice versa) ends up obscuring some critical moves and currents in twentieth-century historiography.
To contextualize this problem, we can point again to Weber, and the tradition of historical sociology that is anchored in his work but finds its real starting point in Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process (originally published in 1939). To paint in broad strokes, this tradition posits a dichotomy between violence and social order, and seeks to explain the ways in which order contains violence, usually by incorporating it within legitimate institutional frameworks. This tradition, in its least intellectually sophisticated manifestations, can be a teleological narrative of the ways in which contemporary liberal order is fashioned (or fails to be fashioned) from chaos and uncertainty; more recent work, such as that of Charles Tilly or Douglass North, has substantially improved on this teleological tendency while keeping the basic insight that institutions—both formal and informal—can lower incentives for actors to “defect” (to cheat or to use violence) in transactions, and thus promote stability, safety, and growth.29 To say that institutions can control violence is not, of course, to argue that they necessarily succeed in so doing, or that institutional configurations cannot sometimes promote violence.30 It bears adding as well that this perspective does not always entail optimism: one only need think of the pessimism that marks the climax of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, a bleak vision of man trapped in the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality. Mutatis mutandis, a similar pessimism about human paralysis in the face of the rationalization of institutions extends to Foucault’s diagnosis in Discipline and Punish of the carceral revolution in contemporary society.
While Weberian pessimism about the disenchantments of modern rational governance is a key part of the tradition of historical sociology, a different reaction to the same processes that Weber described emerged in the wake of World War II. In particular, it is a thread in the critical tradition that emerges from a deep anxiety about the nature of industrial progress and Enlightenment rationality, based more on Marx and Nietzsche (and, to an overlooked degree, on Kierkegaard, about which more below) than in traditional German sociology—though it was certainly indebted to Weber. It is these postwar German thinkers who contributed the most to the problems that a study of violence today entails, and it is worth mapping a few key moves in this line of critical thought to approach an answer to why contemporary scholars are so comfortable with applying the label of “violence” to such a broad range of phenomena.
While the sociological tradition prized a value-neutral approach and therefore relied upon the ethically ambiguous sense of Gewalt, the same cannot be said of the critical projects of the late twentieth century. To give a potted narrative of their development, one could say that, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the world witnessed the advent of new technologies for both mass production and mass destruction (or, depending on one’s perspective, for both simultaneously). These technological developments, claiming to emerge under the banner of progress, culminated in two events: industrialized genocide in bureaucratically rationalized and technically sophisticated death camps, and the nuclear attacks on Japan. The rapidly changing technological horizon was joined to an increase in political consciousness (not least in scholarly circles) of the fragile and sometimes dubious bases of political power and sovereignty. This political consciousness was linked to the technological changes in large measure through the writings of the Frankfurt school, whose emphasis on total critique was rooted in Marx and Nietzsche, but when translated into an American landscape (not least through the work of Marcuse) came to serve as a catalyst for the intellectual and political revolutions of the late 1960s, and from there has informed contemporary critical projects.31
The experience of comprehensive destruction in general, and of a technologically sophisticated genocide in particular, guided inquiry. While this appeared in a variety of manifestations, one place to start would be with Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, in which, through attempting to explain Nazism as a species of “radical evil,” she argued that the nature of the concentration camps—spaces in which “everything is permitted”—led to a form of human experience that defied the categories of language, law, and even ethical thought. Tellingly, “crime” is her point of reference:
We attempt to understand elements in the present or recollected experience that simply surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a thing which, as we feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the mass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of concentrationcamp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness through which they disintegrate. The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All statements of common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature, serve only to encourage those who think it “superficial” to “dwell on horrors.”32
The link here between the tremendous
