perverse nature of revenge appears in another popular drama of the time, John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (ca. 1601). The evil Piero opens the play covered in blood having just murdered Andrugio because many years earlier Andrugio was his rival for the hand of Maria, who had chosen Andrugio. Piero brags, “I am great in blood, / Unequal’d in revenge”11 and plots even more bloody acts. Andrugio’s son, Antonio, bid by the ghost of his father to avenge his murder, acts, it would seem, out of an ancient sense of duty, honor, and justice. But those values become perverted as Antonio, as part of the revenge, murders Piero’s completely innocent son Julio as Julio begs for his life—“Pray you do not hurt me.”12 The motive for revenge begins in duty and transforms into excess and cruelty.
A study of over twenty revenge plays produced in England between 1562 and 1607 concludes that in most of them revenge is “unmistakably condemned,”13 and the plays constitute an intense propaganda campaign against revenge because of the establishment’s fear of the civil disorder that could result from private revenge.14 By the mid-seventeenth century, revenge had few advocates, and bloody acts of revenge in dramas were put into the hands of villains, buttressing a general and unceasing propaganda against revenge.15
By the eighteenth century, the original connection between personal revenge and state punishment had become obscured to the extent that the focus of any rationale for the state’s right to punish bypassed the victim and focused on the duty of the sovereign and the moral status of the perpetrator. The philosophical stances of Kant and Hegel toward punishment capture the prevalent mood of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Kant’s work, for example, punishment by the state is deontological, the absolute right and duty of the state. The law concerning punishment is one of Kant’s categorical imperatives. The state has a duty to punish and for a sovereign to fail to punish, to grant clemency, is itself an act of injustice: “woe to him who rummages around in the winding path of a theory of happiness looking for advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it.”16 A victim’s personal emotions, regarded as “brute forces” by Kant, have no place in punishment, either for severity or mercy. Human beings may be forgiving (placabilitas), but being forgiving should not be confused with tolerating wrongs, “for then a human being would be throwing away his rights and letting others trample on them, and so would violate his duty to himself.”17
Hegel developed Kant’s advocacy of the deontological nature of punishment by refining the idea of balancing that was originally found in feelings about revenge: “crime … contains within itself its own nullification, and this appears in the form of punishment.”18 Rather than the “absurdity” of “specific equality” required by lex talionis (“so that one can even imagine the miscreant as one-eyed or toothless”), Hegel argued that punishment should result in an “inner equality”—the negating of the original negative (crime): “punishment is merely a manifestation of the crime, i.e. it is one half which is naturally presupposed by the other.”19 Hegel shifted the focus to the wrongdoer by arguing that offenders had the right to be punished, that punishing those who do wrong treats them as responsible moral agents making free choices: “In so far as the punishment … is seen as embodying the criminal’s own right, the criminal is honoured as a rational being” (original italics).20 In addition, punishment should be derived from the criminal’s own act, so that he is not “regarded simply as a harmful animal which must be rendered harmless,” but as a rational being.21 Hegel emphasized the personal/impersonal distinction between revenge and retribution and also distinguished the two as immoral and moral respectively: “What is at first sight objectionable about retribution is that it looks like something immoral, like revenge, and may thus be interpreted as a personal matter.”22 For Hegel, state punishment was justified not because it satisfied the victim but because it treated the criminal with dignity.
While Kant’s and Hegel’s theories remain the bedrock for contemporary retributive theories of punishment that argue for treating criminals as responsible moral agents,23 it was Nietzsche’s introduction of the notion of ressentiment that thoroughly condemned the kinds of emotions that would desire revenge. Ressentiment is not merely the anger and resentment that would result from a personal injury. It includes a litany of negative emotions: hate, envy, ill will, suspicion, rancor, revenge, hostility, prejudice, and greed. Saying we want revenge, then, categorizes us as the kind of people who surrender to these primitive urges, and the “emotions that give rise to retributive judgments are always pathological.”24 Wanting revenge, even in the form of state retribution, dooms us, in Nietzsche’s judgment, to be creatures of ressentiment. A good justice system for him does not incorporate such emotions in an Aeschylean vision but shuts them down and stops the “senseless raging of ressentiment.”25 This shutting down is accomplished by disallowing a role for the victim, by providing other compensations for victims, and by using the law to define and restrict what penalties might be exacted. Above all, such a justice system “trains” the minds and perceptions of victims away from any personal feeling about an injury:
But the most decisive thing the higher power does and forces through against the predominance of counter- and after-feelings … is the establishment of the law, the imperative declaration of what in general is to count in its eyes as permitted, as just, what as forbidden, as unjust: after it has established the law, it treats infringements and arbitrary actions of individuals or entire groups as wanton acts against the law, as rebellion against the highest power itself, thereby diverting the feeling of its subjects away from the most immediate injury caused by such wanton acts and thus achieving in the long run the opposite of what all revenge wants, which sees only the viewpoint of the injured one, allows only it to count—from now on the eye is trained for an ever more impersonal appraisal of deeds, even the eye of the injured one himself, (original italics)26
Nietzsche disparages any tendency “to hallow revenge under the name of justice” (original italics).27 Distinctions, nuances, or subtleties between the just anger felt by an Aeschylean Orestes against a real wrong committed against oneself or one’s kin and the crazed anger and other negative emotions that lead to excessive, illegal acts of revenge have fallen under the weight of Enlightenment philosophy. In a series of maneuvers, the original relationship between revenge and justice and the victim’s emotional response to a harm have disappeared and been replaced by ressentiment. In the law of punishment, “reasonable emotion” and “just anger” are oxymorons.
By the time the nineteenth century closed, in some of the most widely read literature of the age, Dickens portrayed the “corrosive powers”28 of revenge and retribution, mirroring the trend in jurisprudence that had begun to abandon retribution as a justification for punishment. This trend gave retributivist theories of punishment the same moral taint that attached to revenge in Elizabethan times. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about the various theories of punishment that were vigorously debated, the debate was largely between deontology and consequentialism. Many strong retributivists gave in to Darwinian ideas that in some ways echoed the pollution doctrine and maintained that “the good of the social organism” was the morally superior justification for punishment rather than a personal, vindictive need for revenge.29 Any state “responsibility” to victims had entirely disappeared and was, in fact, a disreputable notion.
The twentieth century ushered in a reluctance to acknowledge revenge as a human need, and even the reformed Kantian-Hegelian retributivist position became suspect in intellectual circles.30 The desire for revenge and for using the state as a mechanism for retribution met with increasing disapproval, being seen as a “wilful substitution of passion for reason as a guide of conduct, and a kind of passion which, in the form of private revenge, civilised society has agreed to condemn.”31 Retribution became a “polite name for revenge … vindictive, inhumane, barbarous, and immoral.”32 Backward-looking retributive theories of punishment were displaced by forward-looking utilitarian and consequentialist
