Violence and Democracy

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Violence and Democracy
In this provocative book, John Keane calls for a fresh understanding

of the vexed relationship between democracy and violence. Taking
issue with the common-sense view that ‘human nature’ is violent,
Keane shows why mature democracies do not wage war upon each
other, and why they are unusually sensitive to violence. He argues
that we need to think more discriminatingly about the origins of
violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies. He probes the
disputed meanings of the term violence, and asks why violence is
the greatest enemy of democracy, and why today’s global ‘triangle of
violence’ is tempting politicians to invoke undemocratic emergency
powers. Throughout, Keane gives prominence to ethical questions,
such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and
argues that violent behaviour and means of violence can and should
be ‘democratised’ – made publicly accountable to others, so
encouraging efforts to erase surplus violence from the world.
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster.

Born in Australia and educated at the universities of Adelaide,
Toronto and Cambridge, he is a frequent contributor to radio
programmes and newspapers and magazines around the world.
Among his books are The Media and Democracy (1991), which has
been translated into more than twenty languages; the prize-winning
biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995); Civil Society: Old
Images, New Visions (1998); a biography of power, Václav Havel: A
Political Tragedy in Six Acts (1999); and Global Civil Society?
(2003). He was recently Karl Deutsch Professor of Political Science
at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and a Fellow of the influential
London based think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.
He is currently writing a full-scale history of democracy – the first
for over a century.
c o n t e m p o r a ry p o l i t i c a l t h e o ry
Series Editor
Ian Shapiro
Editorial Board
Russell Hardin Stephen Holmes Jeffrey Isaac
John Keane Elizabeth Kiss Susan Okin
Phillipe Van Parijs Philip Pettit
As the twenty-first century begins, major new political challenges have arisen at
the same time as some of the most enduring dilemmas of political association re-
main unresolved. The collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War reflect a
victory for democratic and liberal values, yet in many of the Western countries that
nurtured those values there are severe problems of urban decay, class and racial con-
flict, and failing political legitimacy. Enduring global injustice and inequality seem
compounded by environmental problems, disease, the oppression of women, racial,
ethnic and religious minorities, and the relentless growth of the world’s population.
In such circumstances, the need for creative thinking about the fundamentals of
human political association is manifest. This new series in contemporary political
theory is needed to foster such systematic normative reflection.
The series proceeds in the belief that the time is ripe for a reassertion of the
importance of problem-driven political theory. It is concerned, that is, with works
that are motivated by the impulse to understand, think critically about, and address
the problems in the world, rather than issues that are thrown up primarily in
academic debate. Books in the series may be interdisciplinary in character, ranging
over issues conventionally dealt with in philosophy, law, history and the human
sciences. The range of materials and the methods of proceeding should be dictated
by the problem at hand, not the conventional debates or disciplinary divisions of
academia.
Other books in the series

Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (eds.)
Democracy’s Value
Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (eds.)
Democracy’s Edges
Brooke A. Ackerly
Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism
Clarissa Rile Hayward
De-Facing Power
John Kane
The Politics of Moral Capital
Ayelet Shachar
Multicultural Jurisdictions
John Keane
Global Civil Society?
Rogers M. Smith
Stories of Peoplehood
Gerry Mackie
Democracy Defended
Violence and Democracy
john keane
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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© John Keane 2004
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2004
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Bhikhu Parekh
Contents
Introduction: surplus violence page 1
1 Muskets, terrorists 15
2 Thinking violence 30
3 Civilisation 42
4 Barbarism? 54
5 Why violence? 89
6 Uncivil wars 109
7 Ethics 128
8 Ten rules for democratising violence 165
Further reading 210

Index 214
Introduction: surplus violence
As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and the terror of the

doorbell. In democracy the streets may be unsafe after dark, but
the most likely visitor in the early hours will be the milkman.
Adam Michnik (1998)
This essay is about violence, and the pity of violence. It dwells upon its
connections with democracy because unwanted physical interference
with the bodies of others, such that they experience pain and mental
anguish and, in the extreme case, death – violence, in a word – is the
greatest enemy of democracy as we know it. Violence is anathema to
its spirit and substance. This follows, almost by definition, because
democracy, considered as a set of institutions and as a way of life, is
a non-violent means of equally apportioning and publicly monitor-
ing power within and among overlapping communities of people who
live according to a wide variety of morals.1 Under democratic condi-
tions the means of decision-making are neither owned nor wielded pri-
vately. While its institutional forms are highly variable, democracy as
we know it today minimally requires public respect for others who are
equal but different, and such respect extends to their entitlement to
organise themselves into opposition to the powers that be. Democracy
requires citizens to stay alert, to open their eyes and their mouths –
to understand that societies of sheep typically beget governments
of wolves. It facilitates criticism of power. In principle, democracy
enables everybody to act at a distance from its power centres by means
of a functioning civil society that is independent of publicly account-
able governmental institutions; together, elected, responsible govern-
ment and the dispersal of power within civil society provide organised
protection from the fear or fact of injury or loss of life.
1
The pre-Greek origins, modern development and uncertain future of democracy,
including its variable and disputed meanings, are analysed in detail in my A History
of Democracy, in preparation.
2 v i o l e n c e a n d d e m o c r ac y
Just how unique contemporary democracies are when defining

and handling violence can be glimpsed by comparing them with the
fascist régimes of the recent past. Ponder for a moment the Nazi
euthanasia programme (1939–41), which led to the deaths, on Hitler’s
orders, of an estimated 100,000 German adults and children with men-
tal disorders or incurable physical disabilities: backed by the fist of
organised terrorism and mass mobilisation in the name of the nation
or race, such programmes reveal how fascism was both paranoid
and obsessed with unifying the body politic through the controlling,
cleansing and healing effects of violence, which was often under-
stood through ‘medical’ or ‘surgical’ metaphors.2 Similar language is
let loose in democratic countries, admittedly. It might even be said
that a distinctive quality of democratic institutions is their subtle
efforts to draw a veil over their own use of violence. There are also
plenty of recorded cases where democratic governments hurl violence
against some of their own populations. Such violence is called law and
order, the protection of the public interest, or the defence of decency
against ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’, or ‘counter-terrorism’. Within democ-
racies, medical metaphors sometimes also surface, as when politicians
speak of surgical strikes, sanitary cordons, mopping-up operations and
fighting the ‘cancer’ or ‘plague’ of terrorism.
Mature democracies find such euphemisms embarrassing. They
regard them as corrupting and contestable: on the home front, democ-
racy is marked by a strong inner tendency to non-violence and, hence,
a deep suspicion that what police and armies and men of violence do
in the normal course of their duties is by definition never quite legit-
imate. During transitions to democracy, public suspicion of men of
violence is often expressed with a sudden vengeance, like a geological
upheaval: the ancien régime is accused of murder; searches for the
2
See Sven Reichardt, ‘Formen faschistischer Gewalt. Faschistische Kampfbünde
in Italien und Deutschen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Sociologus, 51 (2001),
pp. 55–88; and ‘Civil society and violence. Some conceptual reflections from an his-
torical perspective’, in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society: Berlin Perspectives (London
and New York 2004), forthcoming.
i n t ro d u c t i o n : s u r p l u s v i o l e n c e 3
disappeared begin; clandestine mass graves are exhumed; citizens are

urged to tell their stories of suffering. Mature democracies refine and
routinise these suspicions of violence and cultivate a measure of can-
niness: violence is not seen simply as the unlawful use of force. Ideally
conceived, democracies understand themselves as systems of lawful
power-sharing, whose actors are attuned to the dangers of violence –
and to the mutual benefits of non-violence.
The calculation, peculiar to democracies, that the commitment
to non-violence makes everyone feel safer is reinforced by the fact that
many citizens and politicians – not all of them, not always a major-
ity, take note – more or less share a peaceful outlook on the world.
They tend to display a strong distaste for cruelty, a genuine interest
in others’ ways of life, or a simple commitment to ordinary cour-
tesy and respect for others, wherever they live and whatever their
skin colour, gender, religious or geographic background. This essay
emphasises just how delicate and destructible is the learned qual-
ity of non-violent openness and how, paradoxically, this contingency
feeds upon the fact that the daily lives of citizens in a democracy are
normally cloth-bound in inherited habits and structured routines that
seem banal and repetitious, but in fact, given their delicacy, should
never be taken for granted.
These thoroughly contingent, existential routines of daily life
are the ‘raw material’ of civility, as it is called throughout this essay.
The members of a democracy, like all human beings, are animals of
erect stature. They find it painful to remain upside down for long and
therefore not only have a common understanding of up and down; they
prefer uprightness. Thanks to language, they likewise have shared
notions of left and right, of immobility or motion. Since they have
bodies, arms and legs, they comprehend what it means to move, to
squash, to kick, to be hit by something hard. Conceptions of constraint
come easily to these beings: they especially dislike it when others
prevent them from talking, or breathing, or when they obstruct their
motion, or strike or physically hurt them. Such dispositions are in
turn enmeshed within, and reinforced by, non-violent webs of more or
less taken-for-granted commitments: conversations, gestures, wash-

ing bodies, patience, laughter, sexual play, cleaning, shopping for con-
sumable items, planning journeys, tending crops and plants, worrying
about income, filling out forms, paying bills, preparing food, looking
after relatives, watching television, reading newspapers, telling chil-
dren about the world and putting them to bed.
So the civil societies upon which today’s democracies rest have
a strong affinity with the will to name and to contain and to root out
violence – to ‘democratise’ violence (as I explain in the pages that
follow) wherever it appears and whatever may be its causes. This
learned capacity to ‘de-nature’ violence, to see it as contingent, as
politically removable from social and political life, is a key reason
why mature democracies have an unblemished record in not waging
war upon each other.3 Their citizens are too canny for that: enjoying
a measure of liberties within a civil society, they tend to see through
claims of sabre-rattlers and warmongers by suspecting that the mutual
deployment of organised violence would not only favour some at the
expense of others, but almost certainly would drown everyone’s lib-
erties in bayous of hubris and blood. The tendency of democracies to
democratise violence also explains why democracies are often good
at winning wars against their anti-democratic opponents, despite the
latter’s military and technical superiority. ‘We shall win this war’,
wrote a distinguished journalist as the British faced the grim prospect
of fascist occupation, ‘because we are still a democracy, because the
eye of criticism is still kept imperious over those who might slink
into slothful, unoriginal methods’.4
3
Michael Doyle, ‘Kant, liberal legacies and foreign affairs’, in Philosophy and Pub-
lic Affairs, 12, 3–4 (1983), pp. 205–35, 323–53. Compare Melvin Small and J. David
Singer, ‘The war-proneness of democratic regimes’, in Jerusalem Journal of Interna-
tional Studies, 1, 4 (1976), pp. 50–69. The authors claim that between 1816 and 1965
58 per cent of inter-state wars were provoked by democracies – wars being defined
as violent conflicts claiming at least 1,000 lives. The claim is unconvincing, if only
because democracies are defined (poorly) as regimes in which just 10 per cent of the
population are enfranchised.
4
Quoted in the interview with Michael Foot, ‘Old Labour’, The Independent on
Sunday, London, 20 July 2003, p. 10 (the original dates from 1940).
These antipathies of democracies toward violence are well

known, but unfortunately they are not the end of the story. All democ-
racies, as we know them today and as they have existed in the past,
are forced to play noughts and crosses with the violence of others,
for instance, mercenaries, dictators, armies, guerrillas and networks
of terrorists equipped with various weapons of violence that they are
prepared to use against democrats, wherever they show their face.
Persuaded by business deals and geopolitical calculations, democratic
governments – when they can get away with it – secretly succour
blood-sucking despots, like Idi Amin and Joseph Mobutu, Saddam
Hussein and the Shah of Iran. And faced with the violence of their
opponents, democracies find themselves trapped within a conundrum:
whether or when or how to develop and deploy their own means of
violence in order to repel or eradicate that of others. Exactly because
democracies are prone to non-violence they are unusually sensitive
to its threatened or actual occurrence elsewhere. Their parties, politi-
cians and leaders come under pressure to sail ships and fly thousands
of troops to places on earth where strangers are subjected to hellish
acts of cruelty. Democracies find it difficult to hide from these atroci-
ties. If they stand aside and ‘do nothing’ – as every democracy did when
the Indonesian military mass-murdered East Timorese citizens –
then they are easily accused of double standards, and callous indif-
ference. If, on the other hand, democracies undertake ‘humanitarian
intervention’ – India’s move into East Pakistan is an example – then
they stand accused of meddling with the affairs of others, of behaving
‘undemocratically’ by heaping violence upon their opponents.
Especially when atrocities are hurled in their direction, democ-
racies are prone to contradict themselves. Their structures of open
power not only enable their violent opponents to work like worms
through the body politic. Their openness enables the rise of parties
and leaders who seek revenge, who pledge solemnly to root out vio-
lence – and in so doing are tempted to behave (here much can be
learned from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick) like the monomaniacal
Captain Ahab who hunts a feared and hated object to all four corners
of the earth, only to suffer crushing defeat. Fortunately – thanks to

public demonstrations and communications media and judiciaries
with teeth – democracies tend to place limits upon the ‘nauseous
self-righteousness’ (Reinhold Niebuhr) of posturing leaders who tell
lies, exaggerate threats, look for surrogate victims and take the side
of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. Their grandiose strategies for dealing violently
with the violent come to be seen as questionable in the courts of pub-
lic opinion. Their actions are media covered and not covert, and for
that reason these leaders often become publicly controversial. Their
behaviour breeds disquiet, and for a good reason. Many within today’s
mature democracies know or sense the rule first glimpsed by the
ancient assemblies and democracies of Babylonia and Phoenicia and
Greece: that the roads through the lands of violence are typically lit-
tered with brazen lying, hubris and corpses, all of which prove emo-
tionally difficult for the inhabitants of democracy, who are exposed
not only to embittered charges about their own double standards, or
outright ‘rottenness’, but also to the possibility that democracy will
be used to defeat democracy, for instance by invoking emergency pow-
ers that eventually transform it into some or other form of military
dictatorship.
Some years ago, in Reflections on Violence (1996), I complained
about the paucity of political reflection upon the contemporary
causes, effects and ethics of violence. Violence was there understood
as any uninvited but intentional or half-intentional act of physically
violating the body of a person who previously had lived ‘in peace’. At
the time, attempts to spark discussion about the meaning or signifi-
cance of violence and politics were bogged down in swamps of seman-
tic confusion or political indifference or strong academic preferences
for discussing theories of justice, communitarianism or the history of
half-dead political languages. There were plenty of case studies of hot
wars, cold wars, civil wars and other violent conflicts, certainly. But
broad-based political reflection on the forms and causes and effects
of violence – Hannah Arendt’s exemplary On Violence and Judith
Shklar’s preoccupation with cruelty were the striking exceptions5 –

seemed no longer to be of much intellectual interest.
And so Reflections on Violence set out to break this glum
silence, initially by exposing its roots within a confused quagmire of
unspoken prejudices and significant assumptions. It pointed out, for
instance, that violence often so shocks our senses that it induces for-
getfulness, or mumbling embarrassment or silence. Especially for the
‘civilised’ person, violence is not a pretty subject. It is ugly enough to
make even the most cheerful thinker pessimistic, and since optimists
write badly (as Valéry said) and pessimists tend not to write at all, the
silence about violence of some parts of the profession of political the-
ory was understandable. Reflections on Violence examined other rea-
sons why at the time the political imagination about violence seemed
frozen. It pointed out that outbreaks of violence blinker the imagina-
tion, in that they induce pragmatism – a sense that the problems at
hand must be solved urgently using such means as arrest, court trial
and incarceration, criminology, clinical analysis, or police or military
intervention. That flat-headed pragmatism often feeds other beliefs,
including the presumption that ‘human nature’ is prone to violence,
and that that is why – inevitably – an armed body like the state should
monopolise its means, without further questions.
There are signs that this latter belief (or vague impression) that
violence is a ‘natural’ or deeply rooted element of the human condition
is today on the rise. For reasons that have to do with the evanescence
of post-Cold War euphoria, and especially (as explained in the pages
that follow) because of the dangerous ‘triangle of violence’ that is now
settling on the whole world, violence and threats of violence are felt by
many to be an ineluctable feature of our world as it is. Violence seems
to be back and here to stay, in a big and disturbing way. The first-ever
global report on violence (published in 2002) tells something of the
5
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London 1969); Judith Shklar, ‘Putting
cruelty first’, in Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA and London 1984), pp. 7–44.
bad news: more than 1.6 million people suffer violent deaths every
year. Each day, on average, over 1,400 people are murdered; roughly
35 people are killed every hour as a result of armed conflict; one quar-
ter of the world’s women have suffered sexual violence by an ‘intimate
partner’.6 Such figures are grist to the mills of journalists working in
the field of communications media, especially television. Indulging
various motives, they help to cultivate the impression that our world
is becoming ever more violent, sometimes to the point where vio-
lence is represented as ‘natural’ – as an eerie constant of the human
condition. Proponents of violence have taken their cue and, seizing
the script, have risen to the occasion: as if to prove that humans are
dastardly creatures, works of violence have become works of art. The
explosions, fear, injury and death are carefully staged, for a world audi-
ence. And so we are living in times when, just as night follows day,
reports of violence flood in from all four corners of the earth. So too
does talk of ‘getting tough’ with violence and calls for ‘war’ against its
menacing forms. The old conviction, once expressed in the theory of
‘democratic zones of peace’, which supposed that advanced societies
like the United States and Britain are no longer seriously troubled by
violence, and that theories of violence are perforce losing their raison
d’être, is on the ground, wounded and shaking.
In emphasising the contingent and erasable character of vio-
lence, this essay reminds readers that the belief that violence is ‘nat-
ural’ – a deep-seated predisposition in every individual, or generative
of either the body politic or of the species as a whole – is both his-
torically specific and profoundly anti-democratic. So this essay meets
head-on the most sophisticated recent effort to speak of violence as
a universal feature of the human condition: René Girard’s La vio-
lence et le sacré (1972).7 Girard sets aside the several ways in which
6
World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva 2002); and
www.who.int/violence injury -prevention
7
Translated as René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London 1988), especially ch. 1;
see also his contributions to René Girard et al., Violences d’aujourdhui, violence de
toujours (Lausanne 2000), pp. 13–26.
democracies democratise violence. When democracies flourish, they

call into question face-value thinking about violence. The meaning
of the term itself comes to be seen as contestable, as well as pliable
enough to be extended onto actions that are then described and/or
condemned as ‘violent’ – which means that they violate the norms of
democratic civility. Democracies also tend to institutionalise proce-
dures – periodic elections, police in uniform and subject to disciplinary
procedures, laws against the violation of the body, chat lines, official
inquiries, freedom of public assembly, press freedom, civilian control
of the armed forces – for making sure not only that the violated get
a fair public hearing, and fair compensation, but that those in charge
of the means of violence are publicly known, publicly accountable to
others – and peacefully removable from office. When they function
well, democracies even enable their critics to name, and to shame,
institutions – like courts of law and prisons – that inflict violence on
their victims using sweeter names like ‘interpretation’ and ‘justice’.8
The historically unique, never-perfect bundle of non-violent power-
sharing techniques that today is called democracy is written out of
Girard’s account of violence. He admits that violence (the term is left
undefined, but seems to be synonymous with blood) does not always
have an immediately felt presence in human affairs. It dons sym-
bolic (especially religious) masks, and in its disguised form it may
well appear to disappear, or to appear benign. There are times, says
Girard, when violence surfaces in terrifying form, wantonly sowing
the poisonous seeds of chaos and destruction. At other times, vio-
lence steps forward as a peace-maker offering the sweet fruits of jus-
tice and reconciliation. At all times, however, violence is a constant
8
See the stimulating comments by Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the word’, Yale
Law Journal, 95 (1986), pp. 1601–29, and the criticism of the ‘agencies of force’ of
actually existing democracies in Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (London 1968), p. 128:
‘They use force to make you do what the deciders have decided you must do . . . They
punish. They have cells and prisons to lock you up in. They pass out sentences. They
won’t let you go when you want to. You have to stay put until they give the word.
If your mother is dying, you can’t go to her bedside to say goodbye or to her graveside
to see her lowered into the earth.’
companion of human affairs. That is why communities can be pro-

tected from their own violence only by choosing surrogate victims
outside themselves. Modern ‘civilised’ societies may appear to put an
end to the practice of ‘interminable revenge’, but they too are based on
judicial systems that offload violence onto the convicted. A common
thread runs through every known procedure designed to keep violence
in bounds: the thread of violence itself. ‘The more men strive to curb
their violent impulses’, concludes Girard, ‘the more these impulses
seem to prosper. The very weapons used to combat violence are turned
against their users. Violence is like a raging fire that feeds on the very
objects intended to smother its flames.’
Violence and Democracy takes aim at this kind of reasoning,
partly because it has a long pedigree in early modern political thought,
and as well because today the influence of such reasoning is regaining
ground. ‘Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed,
will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided’, con-
cludes an epic inquiry into the future of territorial states. The author
seeks authority in the words of the Polish-born writer, Joseph Conrad:
‘the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of
a really relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his
passions will leave a man alone.’9 Along similar lines, Marx’s thesis
(outlined in Das Kapital) that ‘in actual history conquest, enslave-
ment, robbery, murder, in brief violence, notoriously play the great
part’ and his dictum that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society
pregnant with a new one’ swam like a fish in early modern waters.
It is exemplary of a smug conviction whose genesis is tied to the rise
of the West and the birth of modern territorial states and empires:
the conviction that some or other form of violence is ineluctably a
feature of human affairs, that violence has a mind of its own, that
violence reveals the ‘real’ nature of human beings and their historical
strivings.
9
Quoted in Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles. War, Peace and the Course of
History (London and New York 2002), p. 819.
Gripped by this conviction, many observers (René Girard is just

one among many) conclude that all political orders naturally rest upon
violence, whose ‘real’ or ‘ultimate’ purpose is to contain the violent
capacities of others. Other observers have gone further, either by wor-
shipping violence or emphasising its purgative or elevating effects
on human beings. Violence is seen in both functional and aesthetic
terms, as a marvellous means for achieving potentially great human
ends. The plain fact that violence, understood as a means, could degen-
erate into an ulcerous end-in-itself is of little or no concern to these
observers; violence is an object of respect and hope, endlessly fascinat-
ing, an altogether positive cleansing force in the muck-filled stables of
human affairs. The train of thought that supposes that violence ‘like
Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted’ (Jean-Paul
Sartre), is a child of the early modern world. Its conviction that ‘you
can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ (Lenin); that ‘political
power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ (Mao Tse-tung); that violence is
‘as American as cherry pie’ (H. Rap Brown); or that violence is needed
because ‘the day of salvation is near’ (Osama bin Laden) was virtu-
ally absent from European political thinking five centuries ago. Prior
to 1500, with the help of seminal thinkers like Augustine and Ibn
Khaldun, those who reflected upon the subject typically thought in
terms of ‘just violence’; they insisted that although violence has a role
to play in human affairs, it is merely a means that is always in need
of a universal end that justifies and in turn places strict limitations
upon its use.
True, those who ruminated on violence were sometimes
tempted to speak loosely, for instance by describing violence as a
developer of the noble virtues of heroism and endurance among youth.
Yet discourses on violence were normally much more ethically rigor-
ous than this. They were peppered with ‘Thou shalt’ and ‘Thou shalt
not’; with calls (by Muslims) for peaceful reform (islah) and warnings
about the dangers of chaos and schism (fitnah); and (as in the notion
of dharamayuddha in Hinduism and Sikhism) talk of duties towards
others and strict rules governing social order and justice. Violence was
said to be legitimate only when the intention to use it was declared

openly by properly constituted – spiritual and temporal – authorities
who could reasonably expect victory through its use; it was seen to
be merely a means of last resort, an act of redress of previous viola-
tions; and violence was considered a measured method that should
avoid humiliation, and honour and preserve the distinction between
combatants and non-combatants.
The attempt of this essay to think democratically about
violence – to see that it is contingent in both ontogenetic and phyloge-
netic terms, to regard it always as regrettable and potentially remov-
able from political and social life – is not just an effort to revive the
old tradition of ‘just violence’ reasoning that sought to place fences
around violence. Given the technical destructiveness of today’s means
of violence, the imposition of practical limits and burdens of philo-
sophical proof upon unlimited violence remains important. Yet the
approach of this essay is altogether more radical. Its defence of the
idea that violence can be ‘democratised’ – that the means and insti-
tutions of violence must always be publicly accountable and that sur-
plus violence can and should be removed from the world – steers a new
course between and beyond dogmatic pacifism and just war doctrines.
In contrast to traditional just violence thinking, this essay does not
suppose that statesmen and clerics and philosophers are entitled – at
the expense of free-thinking publics – to monopolise debate about the
nature and ethics of violence. Violence and Democracy also repudiates
the crusading presumption, common to all just violence doctrines and
to most versions of pacifism, that there are Universal First Principles
that instruct us how to think, and how to act. This essay asks differ-
ent questions and comes up with different suggestions. It does so by
engaging with some of the modern ‘classics’ on the subject. Violence
and Democracy reacts with and against Georges Sorel’s syndicalist
defence of the workers’ movement in Réflexions sur la violence (1908)
and Walter Benjamin’s essay on law, justice and violence, Zur Kritik
der Gewalt (1921). It grapples with Hannah Arendt’s efforts to distin-
guish violence and power in On Violence (1969). It takes issue with
Frantz Fanon’s attack on white-washing colonialism, Les Damnés de

la terre (1961), especially its insistence that the powerless are entitled
to kill their oppressors, because to do so is to kill two birds with one
stone: the oppressor within and the oppressor without. The narrowly
rights-based and state-centred reasoning of Michael Walzer’s Just and
Unjust Wars (1977) is questioned as well, along with the quite dif-
ferent treatment of violence, sacrifice and ritual in René Girard’s La
violence et le sacré (1972).
Violence and Democracy may be read as a reply to each of these
works, helped along by insights provided by such disciplines as anthro-
pology, history and psychoanalysis. In much-changed historical cir-
cumstances, it seeks to conduct a feet-on-the-ground scrutiny of the
principal threats posed by violence to democratic ways of life. This
essay reflects upon conceptual matters to do with the meaning of
violence; tries to be sensitive to changing historical trends; and draws
attention to some fundamental normative and strategic issues, includ-
ing the overriding need to think democratically about the various pos-
sible remedies for violence. Such thinking requires the recognition
that there is in fact no one substance (like sodium bicarbonate or plu-
tonium 239) that is called violence. It comes in a very wide range of
forms – from spitting and unwanted love bites and smacking children
and street muggings to riotous assembly and political assassinations,
concentration camp murders and terrorist attacks. It is more or less
mediated by technical instruments, ranging from rocks and Molotov
cocktails and rubber bullets to Stealth bombers, tanks and precision-
guided nuclear weapons. And violence can also have many functions.
From the standpoint of individuals or whole groups, it can be a form
of self-defence or self-discovery or self-affirmation or self-destruction;
it can be an insane act of fleeing from reality, a coldly calculated, this-
worldly revenge – a means of achieving certain ends – or a mode of
communication with others, even (perversely) a pleasurable form of
play with the lives of others.
This essay seeks to cultivate in small ways democratic habits of
mind and heart. It sets out to trigger fresh thoughts, to push inquiries
in new directions, above all to ask whether and to what extent violence
and its practitioners can be ‘de-natured’ – subordinated to democratic
institutions and ways of life. In this sense, Violence and Democracy
sets out to counter the rising feeling that our world is heading for
a fall, and that democracy may not survive for much longer. While
marshalling plenty of evidence that the new triangle of violence and
other forms of incivility may well prove the Cassandras right – that
democracy as we know it is in for a rough ride, or that it is bound to
be weakened or perhaps destroyed – Violence and Democracy insists
that that outcome is unnecessary. And so it encourages readers to
think boldly, to think in pain: to refuse politically to set aside the
animal-like pity that grips those who witness the physical violation
of others.
Muskets, terrorists
Today, tragedy is collective.
Albert Camus (1946)
the musket and the bomb

Shortly after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, George
Orwell wrote: ‘The great age of democracy and of national self-
determination was the age of the musket and the rifle.’ He went on
to observe that the advent of the nuclear age flung humanity into
a different – more depressing – order. ‘Had the atomic bomb turned
out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle
or an alarm clock’, Orwell continued, ‘it might well have plunged
us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant
the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police
state’. The mega-technology of nuclear weapons in fact had differ-
ent effects. The bomb had now transformed the final Armageddon
from religious prophesy into factual possibility; it had made think-
able the violent destruction of all remaining democratic states and
their civilised societies. The musket and the rifle were inaccurate, yet
controllable. But now, according to Orwell, the human species risked
either destroying itself with its own grotesque weapons, or destroying
democracy with a new form of servitude wrapped in a ‘cold war’ peace
that was not really peace at all. ‘Looking at the world as a whole’, he
concluded, ‘the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy
but towards the reimposition of slavery . . . in a state which was at
once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its
neighbours.’1
1
George Orwell, ‘You and the Atom bomb’, Tribune, 19 October 1945, reprinted in
Selections from Essays and Journalism: 1931–1949 (London 1981), p. 715.
Orwell’s remarks were astute. They grasped the momentous

global dangers posed by nuclear weapons; they pointed as well to
the close relationship between violence and democracy, in partic-
ular to the general dangers posed to democratic ways of life by
violence in its various forms. The half-century before Hiroshima
and Nagasaki had been no paradise, as Orwell knew from bitter per-
sonal experience. The years that followed were no better, as he pre-
dicted. In matters of violence, the twentieth century proved to be the
worst ever. Total war, chemical weapons, genocidal wars, firebombed
cities, concentration camps, spreading plagues of private blood-
letting; the whole of that century saw more than its share of planned
and unplanned violence. It was – statisticians tell us – the most
murderous century in recorded history. The estimated death toll of
187 million souls was the equivalent of more than one-tenth of
the world’s population in 1913.2 It was a century of the break-up
of empires and revolutions, and thus of the violent blurring of the
boundaries between inter-state violence and violent conflicts (‘civil
wars’) within states. It was also a century in which the burdens of
war weighed ever more heavily on civilians; like defenceless pawns
on a chessboard of cruelty, they became the favourite targets of
military calculations. During the 1914–18 war, civilians comprised
one-twentieth of the victims. During the 1939–45 war, that propor-
tion rose to two-thirds; these days, perhaps nine-tenths of the victims
of war are civilians.
Historians of this violence have begun to record tales of the
courageous, who struggled to survive what Ernst Jünger famously
called its storms of steel: the tunnel-builders of the ghettos, digging to
outwit those who planned their genocide; the mourning women bear-
ing white scarves, stamped with the names of their loved ones, stand-
ing in silence, in the shadows of a terrorist state; ethnically cleansed
2
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘War and peace in the 20th century’, London Review of Books,
21 February 2002, pp. 16–18.
m u s k e t s , t e r ro r i s t s 17
villagers, mourning their beloved, weeping over the destruction of

their houses and farms, praying that their conquerors do not raze their
crops; the Buddhist monks, dressed in crimson robes, silently wit-
nessing cruelties inflicted on innocents by savage troops; the office
employees jumping to their death from a collapsing skyscraper, hold-
ing hands. Such bright images of bravery will no doubt prove remark-
able for future generations, but only because of the mountains of
cruelty that cast shadows over democratic institutions and ways of
life: the cruelty symbolized by the trenches of the Somme, where
soil and flesh mixed to make pink-grey mud; the burning and recy-
cling of corpses, so that they could be turned into gunpowder to make
more skeletons out of future enemies; the torturer armed with prized
instruments like electrodes, syringes, and the rectoscope, an instru-
ment used to place gnawing and clawing rats inside victims; the mil-
itary officers, flinging drugged or murdered bodies of young men and
women out of helicopters and planes into the ocean depths below;
and, as Orwell noted, the dripping flesh and swollen faces inflicted by
a bomb whose flash proved brighter than the sun.
These symbols of the long century of violence now behind us
have become – whether we like it or not – irrevocably part of our
living history. Images of cruelty cannot easily be forgotten, which is
why they need to be placed in historical perspective, as some have
sought to do during the past decade by taking refuge in the consol-
ing thesis known as the theory of democratic peace. After a terrible
century of violence, its proponents say, the world has now become
divided into two parts: a democratic zone of peace, an open and pros-
perous ‘security community’ comprising one-seventh of the world’s
population and most of its power, a community whose ‘national secu-
rity’ calculations, military power and means of war have ceased to be
instruments of politics, a patch of the earth where civil peace and
parliamentary democracy is the norm; and the rest of the world, a
zone of violent anarchy, hopelessly entangled in war and warlordism,
famine and lawlessness, a sphere in which civility and stability are
mere words because people’s lives are trapped by ‘coups and revolu-
tions, civil and international wars, and internal massacres and bloody
repression’.3
The democratic peace thesis supposes not that violence is with-
ering away, but that it is an external problem, a threat emanating
from outside otherwise peaceful democratic institutions and ways of
life. The thesis is unconvincing. For citizens who today live in the
so-called democratic zone of peace, the world is not so neatly sub-
divided into peaceful and violent zones. The old rule that mature
democracies do not fight each other certainly applies, but that does
not mean that democracies can forget about violence, or consider it
a marginal phenomenon. The truth is that various trends are con-
niving to unsettle the comfortable image of a democratic peace.
Most of them, including the tightening links between the two worlds
forged by global arms production (currently valued at around US $40
billion per annum) and the violence-ridden drugs trades, are obvi-
ous. So too are the tensions aroused by the military supremacy of
the United States, and the enclaves of violent lawlessness – danger-
ous areas like the Strasbourg district of Neuhof, the Los Angeles sub-
urb of South Central or ravaged cities like Ahmadabad in Gujurat –
within nearly every urban area of the developed democratic world.
It could even be said, paradoxically, that life within the democratic
zone of peace feels more violent than elsewhere in the world, mainly
because within the democratic countries images and stories of vio-
lence move ever ‘closer’ to citizens who otherwise live in peace.
Violence feels omnipresent. Insurance companies remind potential
clients of the need for risk calculations and safety requirements.
Policing authorities advertise the dangers to citizens. The flourish-
ing private security business markets its wares. Campaigns to publi-
cise violence and to mobilise the criminal process (against rapists and
child molesters, for instance) compound this feeling that the world is
3
Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of
Turmoil (Chatham, NJ 1993), ch. 1.
taking a violent turn. So too does the development of a global system of

communications, parts of which know that violence – horror movies,
blood sports, horrific murders – attracts audiences, and so is driven
by market instincts that follow the editorial rule that ‘if it bleeds, it
leads’.
The last factor is one important reason why the democratic
peace thesis is implausible.4 Thanks in part to the growth of com-
municative abundance and high-pressure media coverage, the rooms
of the world feel increasingly stuffed with violence. According to
some observers, Tanaka Akihiko, Giuseppe Sacco and Umberto Eco
for instance, communications media are helping us see that we are
drifting, despite all illusions of ‘progress’ and ‘peace’ and ‘security’, in
the direction of a self-contradictory, multilayered ‘new middle ages’
marked neither by the spiritual unity of Christendom nor the secu-
lar unity of empire. This emerging neo-medieval order, they claim,
is a world in which the political significance of territorial boundaries
declines. The range of claimed authorities and conflicting types of
legitimation multiply. Positively speaking, it is a world in which there
is a marked growth, on a global scale, of supranational law which takes
precedence over the domestic laws of states without being rooted in
popular sovereignty; in which there is a return, in both political and
everyday discourse, of the notion of a ‘world society’; and in which –
reminiscent of the doctrine of ius gentium intra se defended by
Francisco Suárez, Francisco de Vitoria and other Spanish theologians
and teachers of law – there is a strengthening sense among powerful
states of the droit de regard over the domestic affairs of other states, of
the duty to intervene wherever human rights are violated. But, Sacco
and Eco argue, the new medieval order is not without its troubles and
dangers. Negatively speaking, it is a world defined by the spread of
plagues of private violence and ‘permanent civil war’ sanctioned by
decentralised powers – new warlords, pirates, gunrunners, gangsters,
4
Jeffrey Goldstein (ed.), Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment
(New York 1998).
sects – which the modern state was supposed to crush, but which it
has manifestly failed to do.5
the triangle of violence

The claim that our world is slipping back or sliding forwards into
a new and violent form of mediaevalism is a healthy corrective to
the illusions of the democratic peace hypothesis. The weaknesses of
both can be set aside by concentrating on a different, more precise
account of the novelty of our situation. Quite aside from the ongoing
tendency of democracies and their civil societies to produce troubling
amounts of violence at home – rapes, muggings, gang-land crimes,
bizarre Columbine High School-style murders6 – there is also mount-
ing evidence that actually existing democracies, despite the end of
the Cold War, are today falling under the shadow of a new and highly
unstable triangle of violence.7
One side of the triangle is the instability caused by nuclear-
tipped states in the post-Cold War world system of geopolitics. This
system is currently dominated by the United States, which can and
does act as a vigilante military power, ultimately backed by threats
of nuclear force. As a dominant power, it is engaged in several regions
without being tied permanently to any of them, but its manoeuvres
are complicated by the fact that it is presently forced to coexist and
interact peacefully with four power blocks, three of whom are nuclear
powers: Europe and Japan, and China and Russia. The geometry of this
5
See Umberto Eco, ‘Living in the new Middle Ages’, in Faith in Fakes. Essays (London,
1986), pp. 73–85. The twentieth-century version of the medievalisation of violence
‘without Giotto, Dante, or the inspiration of Christ’ is traceable to Guiglielmo
Ferrero, Peace and War (London 1933), p. 96 (translation amended). It is developed
in new directions in Tanaka Akihiko, The New Middle Ages. The World System in
the 21st Century (Tokyo 2002), esp. ch. 7.
6
There is a vast literature on such forms of violence, which are analysed in more detail
below. See Robert Jackall’s thought-provoking study of disorder in New York, Wild
Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order (Cambridge, MA 1997) and my
Reflections on Violence (London and New York 1996), especially pp. 113–22.
7
The following section draws upon my Whatever Happened to Democracy? (London
2002).
arrangement clearly differs from the extended freeze imposed by the

Cold War, when (according to Raymond Aron’s famous formula) most
parts of the world lived in accordance with the rule, ‘peace impossible,
war unlikely’. With the collapse of bipolar confrontation, this rule has
changed. There is no evidence of the dawn of a post-nuclear age, and
the freedom from the fear of nuclear accident or attack that that would
bring. Nowadays, peace has become a bit less impossible and war a
bit more likely, principally because a form of unpredictable nuclear
anarchy has settled on the whole world.8
It may be, as some observers claim, that nuclear weapons have
so reduced the need for mass mobilisation of troops that they sustain
a permanent ‘civilianisation’ of daily life in some Western states.9
Insofar as these nuclear weapons have also reduced the likelihood
of war among the dominant powers, it may also be true that the
probability of a nuclear apocalypse, in which the earth and its peo-
ples are blown sky-high, has been permanently reduced.10 The deep
trends are nevertheless uncertain, and arguably those living within
8
See the concluding interview in Pierre Hassner, La violence et la paix: De la bombe
atomique au nettoyage ethnique (Paris 1995), especially p. 383: ‘In the past, the
doctrine of deterrence matched the civil character of our societies: an invisible hand,
or abstract mechanism, took charge of our security, and we did not have to bother our
heads with it. But today the nuclear issue can no longer be considered in isolation, it is
inextricably mixed up with everything else.’ A more activist perspective is provided
by Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger (New York 2002).
9
Paul Hirst, War and Power in the 21st Century. The State, Military Conflict and the
International System (Oxford 2001), p. 39.
10
A classic reflection on the problem is Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations:
The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York 1954). Following the nuclear attack
on Japan, he claimed that the avoidance of a nuclear World War III required the
structural transformation of the anarchic territorial state system into a world state.
He saw that requirement as necessary, but as impossible to satisfy. No world state –
except one that was imposed in the aftermath of World War III – could be built unless
it was built upon a sense of world community nurtured by shared moral and political
values. Morgenthau concluded that such a world polity was unlikely, since no such
community of values was available, either in the present or in the foreseeable future.
Some observers, including the American ‘realist’ scholar Kenneth Waltz, have turned
Hans Morgenthau’s conclusions upside down, to argue that the gradual spread of
nuclear weaponry is more to be welcomed than feared, principally because the rising
dangers of accident or attack will spawn the growth of global self-restraint in all
matters nuclear. See Jonathan Schell, ‘The folly of arms control’, Foreign Affairs, 79,
5 (September/October 2000), pp. 29–30.
democracies, or those who aspire after a democratic way of life, need

to be on guard. For various reasons, perpetual peace is a very long
way off in the future. The key political powers are currently preoccu-
pied with seeing through a ‘revolution in military affairs’,11 in which
armed force will be geared increasingly to electronic intelligence gath-
ering, computerised communications networks, protective screens,
and highly destructive, precision-guided or ‘smart’ weapons capable of
use anywhere on the globe. It is highly doubtful whether such weapons
can eliminate ‘frictions’ (as von Clausewitz called them) from battles.
There are doubts too about whether the claimed level of precision can
be affordably and reliably achieved, or whether civilians uninterested
in military heroism will be prepared to witness, in silent gratitude,
the violent elimination of others by remotely piloted vehicles, nano-
weapons and sophisticated information systems. Major wars using
these and more old-fashioned weapons remain a long-term possibil-
ity, including even the use of nuclear-tipped weapons in conflicts that
originate in local wars and disputes.
Whether nuclear conflict can be avoided is unclear; alternative
scenarios are equally likely. Actually existing democracies are now
embedded within a risk-producing system in which the possibility
of a damaging theft or spillage of nuclear materials, or nuclear reac-
tor meltdown or the open use of nuclear weapons is chronic. A taste
of things to come is governments’ talk of radiological weapons and
dirty bombs, the private trafficking of ‘orphaned’ nuclear materials
and the routine dropping of depleted uranium shells on the victims
of war. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons sprout like the dragon’s teeth of
Cadmus. The arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation
each contain somewhere around 7,000 nuclear warheads.12 Despite
11
The policy trends are analysed in Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the
Future of Warfare (Washington 2000); E. A. Cohen, ‘A revolution in warfare’, Foreign
Affairs (March–April 1996), pp. 37–54; and in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (eds.),
In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica
1997).
12
The Times, London, 10 February 2001, p. 16.
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, nuclear capacity, as can be

seen in the arms races between Pakistan and India, and between Israel
and the Arab states, is spreading, despite any prior agreements about
the rules of nuclear confrontation and despite the fact (revealed in
the so-called National Missile Defense system planned by the Bush
administration) that the issue of nuclear weapons is now deeply impli-
cated in the so-called ‘modernisation’ of weapons systems. American
officials, aware that their old Cold War rival is no longer so, mean-
while like to speak of a ‘generic’ threat, a bundle of potential dangers
that might well arise at any moment, somewhere else in the world.
Hence the investment, since the early 1980s, of some $60 billion
in the project of developing a National Missile Defense programme
that takes aim at ‘rogue’ powers equipped with nuclear weapons.
One trouble with this roguish project is that there are potentially
large numbers of other rogues; the US State Department currently
lists fourty-four governments endowed with nuclear weapons’ capac-
ity, which helps explain why the world’s governing institutions are
already plagued by rivalries between new-comer nuclear govern-
ments. The world’s first nuclear confrontation unrelated to the Cold
War – five tests conducted by India in May 1998, followed by seven
tests by Pakistan – has been reinforced by a long sequence of new
and equally threatening developments: North Korea’s ongoing efforts
to build weapons; worries about the undetectable ‘basement prolif-
eration’ of gas-centrifuge and laser-enrichment methods of producing
nuclear weapons material; continuing doubts about Russia’s ability to
keep safe its nuclear weapons and materials (despite American con-
tributions of $2.3 billion per annum under the Nunn–Lugar legisla-
tion); American interest in developing ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons
that could be used against hardened or deep underground targets; and
American assurances that it will not object to China’s plans to expand
its nuclear arsenals – plans which would in effect lead to the end of the
current worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing, as codified in the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The worst fears of Orwell are begin-
ning to materialise: nuclear armaments appear to be breeding nuclear
armaments. Talk of ‘throw-weight gaps’, ‘windows of vulnerability’

and ‘missile gaps’ admittedly no longer echoes through the corridors
of power. Yet ominous signs are everywhere. New revelations of past
and present administrative carelessness and ‘normal’ nuclear acci-
dents are streaming into public circulation. Compensation claims are
finding their way into the world’s courts. The sequence of develop-
ments actually runs longer and deeper than this, and is by defini-
tion (like the future) uncertain. But one conclusion is unavoidable: all
democracies are now potentially threatened by a world system that
produces a rabble of self-interested nuclear powers that are sharply
opposed to the aim of either reducing or abolishing outright nuclear
weapons.
uncivil war
And so to the second side of the triangle of violence: democracies
are today also threatened by the violence unleashed in uncivil wars.
These comprise armed conflicts that rip apart political institutions,
poison the institutions of civil society and fling their combatants into
self-preoccupation with survival.13 Examples of this second form of
violence are to be found in abundance, and include two decades of
fighting in the Sudan, fuelled by constant imports of arms that reach
the hands of state and non-state actors, who struggle to use these arms
in highly complex ways to kill and maim others in order to preserve or
acquire land, cattle, wealth and power. The conflict has resulted in the
death of at least 2 million people and another 4 million are refugees in
their own country – internally displaced people, in the jargon of the
INGO world.14
13
Uncivil wars are analysed in my Reflections on Violence, pp. 131ff. General remarks
about such forms of conflict are scattered throughout Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda
Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York 1995) and Fergal Keane, Season of Blood:
A Rwandan Journey (New York 1995), especially pp. 1–40, 161–98.
14
See Francis Deng, War of Visions (Washington, DC 1995); Abdelwahab El-Affendi,
For a State of Peace. Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan (London 2002);
and the report by the International Crisis Group, God, Oil and Country. Changing
the Logic of War in Sudan (Brussels 2002).
Uncivil war zones of the Sudanese kind are marked by terrible

suffering. Those who are caught up in their maelstroms of violence
suffer a shrinking of existential horizons caused by unimaginable cru-
elties. Armies, militias and rag-tag criminal gangs rape, pillage and
murder to the point where virtually all remaining islands of civil-
ity are wrecked, beyond repair. The flames of violence typically are
fuelled by global flows of arms, money and men, who take advantage
of the fact that local political institutions are crumbling and competi-
tor power groups are jostling for territory and resources. Whole pop-
ulations are consequently dragged down into dark holes of violence.
The results can hardly be described or analysed as ‘civil war’, a term
that has always supposed, under modern conditions, that combatants
were locked into a violent but disciplined struggle for control over
the key resources of territorial state power. Civil wars are carefully
planned and executed struggles to seize or to preserve the means of
state power by using rational-calculating violent methods. They are
considered civil because civilians participate in the struggles for state
power; and they are considered to be wars because violence is used as
a tactical means by all parties.
The problem with the concept of civil war (as we shall see
in more detail later in this essay) is its inability to grasp the ways
in which struggles for political power can and do easily become a
euphemism for the most terrible experiences of anarchic destruction
and death. The Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kashmir, the ill-named Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo are just a few of the many conflicts in
which combatants’ violent struggle makes a terrible descent into hell –
towards a place where the means and acts of violence assume a life of
their own. Within uncivil war zones, violence becomes a grisly end
in itself. People get killed and wounded ultimately for no other rea-
son except that they can be killed and wounded. It is as if the violent
can only affirm their identity through violence projected onto others.
The violent need enemies who appear to threaten them with extinc-
tion, and who therefore must be persecuted, tortured, mutilated, anni-
hilated. In uncivil war zones, violence has a profound functional
advantage. Rivalries, jealousies, quarrels within the community of the

violent are projected outwards, onto others, in life-affirming acts of
desperate cruelty against ‘surrogate victims’.15 All sober restrictions
governing the ground rules of war are swept aside.
The enemy is demonised as all-powerful, as all-threatening, as
all-violent. The rituals of violence against them are thus repeated
endlessly, shamelessly, without limit. Acts of violence become gra-
tuitous. The killers’ faces look blank. Sometimes they smile. Their
words are cynical, or spill out as clichéd accounts of their private or
group fantasies. Alibis flourish, certainly. Yet the laws of engagement
are quite transparent: murder and counter-murder innocents, sever the
hands and genitals of the enemy, cut out their tongues or stuff their
mouths with stones, destroy graveyards, rape women, poison food,
torch crops, make sure the victims’ blood flows like water. Guarantee
that there are no innocent bystanders. Punish waverers – like the mod-
erate Hutu leader, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was murdered by her
fellow Hutus for her moderation, her half-naked body left dumped on
a terrace, a beer bottle shoved up her vagina. Everybody on the side of
the violent must be baptised in blood, made into an accomplice of das-
tardly crimes. Ensure that everybody witnesses rape, torture, murder.
Make sure that they are defiled, that they do not forget what they
have seen or done. Trouble democrats and others with painful ques-
tions: what bestial instincts drive Bosnian Serb torturers to amuse
themselves by forcing their Muslim victims to bite off the testicles of
other Muslims? What class of unreason prompts a Rwandan priest to
set fire to his own church where terrified citizens have sought sanc-
tuary? Why did Serbian bulldozer drivers dig mass graves before the
murder of their victims began? What manner of people are we who
accept such degradation in our midst? And when all is said and done,
be prepared, as Slobodan Milošević did before the Hague Tribunal, to
15
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London 1988), pp. 4–6, 8–10, 269–73; cf. the
fine study of the uncivil war in the Lebanon by Samir Khalaf, ‘The scares and scars
of war’, in Cultural Resistance. Global and Local Encounters in the Middle East
(London 2001), especially pp. 201–33.
boast to journalists and judges that the butchers are actually heroes,
that the victims are fictions or that they deserved what they got – that
this was no crime against humanity.
apocalyptic terrorism
Every nook and cranny of the democratic world is today threatened
by a third form of violence: apocalyptic global terrorism. Terroristic
violence of this kind arguably dates from the early 1980s. Of course,
the phenomenon of terrorism – the word itself dates from the revo-
lutionary terrorisme of the period from March 1793 to July 1794 in
France – is much older.16 Its so-called ‘classical’ forms include opera-
tions that use (or threaten to use) violence to instil fear into others for
the purpose of achieving defined political goals. While states can cer-
tainly be terrorist, in the sense that they can use assassins and other
violent undercover agents to govern through their subjects’ fear of vio-
lent death, conventional terrorism of the non-state variety is typically
the work of fighters who are neither uniformed soldiers nor organised
in elaborate hierarchical command structures. They are trained in the
arts of handling explosives and light weaponry, usually within urban
areas. Unlike guerrillas, such as the Kenyan Mau Mau and the Algerian
FLN and today’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC),
conventional terrorists do not seek to occupy their enemy’s territory.
Even though they too use lightning attacks and swift retreats, terror-
ists have neither the numerical strength nor the military capacity nor
the will physically to defeat their opponents. Like rats in a sewer, they
operate in small and practically autonomous units within the more or
less invisible channels of the local civil society, in order to wear down
and demoralise their governmental enemy, whom they suppose –
ultimately, despite everything – to be capable of negotiation, con-
cession and retreat. New means of communication, such as mobile
phones and the Internet, definitely enable terrorists to widen and mul-
tiply their contacts into all-channel networks, all the while keeping
16
See Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (London 1987).
their activities invisible or ‘private’ in order – paradoxically – to win

over public support for their case. Propaganda of the violent deed –
planting bombs in the consciousness of the people – is among their
specialties. So too is the struggle for victory by means of fear induced
by measured acts of violence that have socially and politically disrup-
tive effects.
The cruel but measured deployment of violence – not indis-
criminate killing and maiming on a large scale – was always and still
remains a critical feature of classical terrorism, including its fascist
variants. The fascist action squads that formed after World War I
typically comprised demobilised men in their twenties and thirties
who vented their frustrations on domestic targets – communists,
Catholics, socialists, trade unionists, Jews – through ‘punitive expe-
ditions’ geared to curing the body politic of disorder and disease.17
Latter-day acts of violence by Basque and Irish and Colombian gun-
men, hijackers and bombers similarly mean business and want pub-
licity, but the cruelty and panic they inflict is also restrained, even
when (as the Red Army Faction thought) the task was to unmask
the fascist character of the state and to create a parallel army of the
people. Like the old proponents of squadrismo, these acts of violence
do not aim to kill lots of people, which is why terrorism of the apoc-
alyptic kind is a new departure. It is true that strongly ‘classical’ ele-
ments of terrorism were evident in the suicide attacks on American
and French military facilities in Beirut in the early 1980s, the Aum
Shinrikyō’s attack on the Tokyo Metro, the bombing in early 1995
of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the simultaneous attacks
on the American embassies in Dar es-Salaam and Nairobi in August
1998, and the assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center
in September 2001. Each of these attacks aimed at a fundamental
17
Note Mussolini’s view of squad violence as a controlled medical experiment: ‘The
expeditions must always have the character of a just retaliation and a legitimate
reprisal. We do not make violence into a school, a system or, worse still, an aesthetic.
Violence must be generous, chivalric and surgical’ (quoted in Margherita G. Sarfatti,
Dux (Milan 1926), p. 250).
change of the political order; and each unleashed violence in urban

settings without however attempting to occupy its territory. Yet each
attack represented a rupture with the tactics of conventional terror-
ism. Apocalyptic terrorists thought of themselves as engaged in total
war against an enemy that was unworthy of negotiation and inca-
pable of compromise. The enemy was seen as both morally null and
void and good for nothing but annihilation. Hence unlimited violence,
bloodcurdling in its technical simplicity and witnessed by millions,
is justified. The aim of apocalyptic terrorism is to take advantage of
the vulnerability of complex systems, to choose targets – key symbols
of American power, for instance – and then to come out of hiding to
kill indiscriminately on a massive scale. Not just embassies or air-
ports or nightclubs or hotels, but whole cities should be razed. The
point is neither to win over public support nor to negotiate political
deals. A deathly zero-sum game has to be played. Anonymity should
be preserved.18 Responsibility need not be claimed. Like a God, the
terrorist should be everywhere and nowhere. The terror must be nei-
ther directly graspable nor manageable: it should function as noise
whizzing through the heads of its potential victims. The name of the
game is militant defeatism. The minds and bodies of the enemy should
be shaken to their core. They should (to use prison language) be buried
alive, tortured in their isolation, compelled to doubt themselves into
oblivion. Meaning itself should be destroyed. The rottenness of the
present-day world should be exposed. Nothing but catastrophe should
result.
18
See the remarks of Jürgen Habermas in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of
Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London
2003), p. 29: ‘partisans fight on familiar territory with professed political objectives
in order to conquer power. This is what distinguishes them from terrorists who are
scattered around the globe and networked in the fashion of secret services . . . The
terrorism we associate for the time being with the name “al-Qaeda” makes the iden-
tification of the opponent and any realistic assessment of the danger impossible. This
intangibility is what lends terrorism a new quality.’
Thinking violence
The problems of violence still remain most obscure
Georges Sorel (1906)
on violence
Can democracies survive this triangle of violence? Can they do any-
thing to attenuate, even eliminate, its globally destructive conse-
quences? Possible replies to such questions initially require greater
clarity about the troubled and troubling term ‘violence’. What exactly
is the meaning of this much-used, much-abused term?
Like all concepts in the human sciences, categories like vio-
lence are as dangerous as they are necessary. They can be fatal for the
imagination, in that they lull their users into a false sense of certainty
about the world, seducing them into thinking that they ‘know’ it like
the backs of their hands; on the other hand, without such categories,
thinking is swamped, sometimes drowned, by the world’s otherwise
unintelligible tides and waves and storms of events, people and things.
One way of escaping this dilemma, which undoubtedly grips political
thinking about violence, is to build a measure of indeterminacy into
the category of violence by defining it abstractly as an ‘ideal-type’ –
understanding it as an arbitrarily chosen, yet clearly defined term
that seeks to redescribe the world in order to attune our senses to
its complex political realities, marking them off as ‘significant’, as
‘problematic’ and therefore as worthy of our attention.
The task of clearly defining violence is complicated by the fact
that since the middle of the eighteenth century the term itself has
undergone a definite ‘democratisation’, by which I mean three things.
The scope of application of the term ‘violence’ has been broadened;
its meaning has come to be seen as heavily context-dependent and,
hence, as variable in time and space; in consequence of which the term
t h i n k i n g v i o l e n c e 31
‘violence’ and its negative connotations are now notoriously contested

in such fields as criminal law, journalism, public policy and everyday
life. It is vital to take note of this democratisation process, if only
to offset the bad habit of some historians, who use the term impre-
cisely and anachronistically. In the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies life was much more dangerous than now, Muchembled writes,
because violence constituted ‘the common thread of human relations
and of the sociability characteristic of various groups of the popula-
tion’.1 Sweeping statements of this kind lose track of the historicity of
their key term. Consider for a moment the striking contrast between
Darnton’s gripping account of the lynching, burning and torture of
cats in pre-1789 France, Germany and England, and current contro-
versies about ‘cruelty to animals’. The contrast reminds us that acts
that were once considered as unproblematic, as carnavalesque, as by
no means violent but even a matter of fun, come to be regarded, at a
later moment and in a different context, as strangely cruel, even repul-
sive curiosities.2 The same lesson – that the concept of violence has no
1
Robert Muchembled, La violence au village: sociabilité et comportements populaires
en Artois du Xve au XVIIe siècle (Turnhout 1989), p. 9.
2
These reflections on violence and democratisation necessarily prompt questions
about whether or not it is justified to speak of violence by humans against the living
creatures of the biosphere. Reasons of space prevent proper treatment of the sub-
ject, although as far as I can see there are no good reasons in principle why the
concept of violence being developed here should be confined to human affairs.
The growing public sensitivity to ‘cruelty to animals’ in democratic countries is
probably symptomatic of the long-term historical shift that is taking place in favour
of extending the term ‘violence’ into fields of life previously ruled by other descrip-
tors. Normatively speaking, non-violent campaigns and laws against single-minded,
cold-blooded violence against nature are on balance to be welcomed, if only because
they problematise the ugly callousness of vivisection practices that extend back into
the nineteenth century (see Frances Power Cobbe, The Modern Rack: Papers on Vivi-
section (London 1889) and Albert Leffingwell, The Vivisection Controversy: Essays
and Criticisms (London 1908)). Proud of its achievements and potentials, vivisec-
tionism came dressed in the uniform of hubris, and not surprisingly the claim of the
animal experimenters that science and industry required freedom from inspection,
ethical judgement and legal controls helped prepare the ground, historically speaking,
for respectable and often well-intentioned doctors performing hideous experiments
upon helpless human beings (see Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, Doctors
of Infamy: The Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes (New York 1949)).
straightforwardly universal meaning – can be learned by pondering the

riots that erupted from early modern European religious festivals and
popular preaching, in which crowd members regularly practised rites
of violence against those whom they considered diabolic filth with-
out however calling their rituals acts of violence, exactly because they
came clothed in symbols drawn from the Bible, the liturgy and folk
traditions.3 A similar rule applied to medieval Europe’s customs of rit-
ualised combat or ‘deep play’ – dangerous and bone-breaking games,
like football, bridge-fighting and bull running, that were again not
seen as remedial acts of violence because they were typically tied to
the agricultural cycle and self-consciously expressed as a community’s
self-understanding as a tightly bonded communitas.4
Those who use the concept of violence must be aware of these
spatial and temporal anomalies. Such anomalies help to explain why
the term itself has undergone a measure of democratisation. Face-
value thinking about the term ‘violence’ is in decline. There is grow-
ing awareness of its ideal-typical – contestable, alterable – character.
This process of conceptual democratisation is arguably part of a much
wider – politically embattled – historical shift in favour of the
democratisation of violence in the real world. Whereas once upon
a time cruelty was excused through euphemisms or talk of honour,
those who are cruel towards others now find themselves called vio-
lent. This denaturalisation of acts that are harmful to others, the
tendency to name them as ‘violent’ and so to disrupt their taken-for-
granted quality, is evident in the remarkable extension of the term
from the ‘core’ domains of the military and police and institutions of
criminal law – the so-called repressive apparatuses of government –
into other spaces of life and classes of action, as has happened during
3
Natalie Z. Davis, ‘The rites of violence’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern
France: Eight Essays (Stanford 1975), pp. 152–87.
4
Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep play: notes on a Balinese cockfight’, in his The Interpretation
of Culture: Selected Essays (New York 1973), pp. 412–53; and Julius R. Ruff, Violence
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York 2001), ch. 5.
the past several decades with the emergence of talk of ‘domestic vio-
lence’, stalking, ‘road raging’ and ‘bullying’ of children.5
Such trends are to be welcomed, even if they unavoidably com-
plicate efforts to think more deeply about the relationship between
violence and democracy. So how can such efforts best proceed? Are
there rules for thinking prudently about violence? Certainly, compli-
cations should be seen as no stranger to reflections on violence. Given
the potency of the term – its capacity to throw light on the strengths
and vulnerabilities of democratic institutions and ways of life – it
should be handled with care and modesty, even with a sense of irony.
And especially in the face of attempts to dismiss it as a uselessly mud-
dled category, as Robert Paul Wolff tried to do from a philosophically
anarchist perspective,6 there is a strong prima facie reason for holding
to its narrowest possible core meaning, untainted by loose metaphor-
ical allusions (as when a standard or treaty is said to be ‘violated’
or somebody suffers a ‘violent convulsion’, or shakes ‘violently’, or
hears their speech acts called ‘violent’ because they are passionate
or immoderate). Other rules for thinking about violence are worth
observing. While efforts to define violence should acknowledge the
importance and power of intentional action, they should not be tied
too closely to any one particular motivation. Definitions of violence
that draw upon references, say, to ‘Man’s sinfulness’ or to ‘aggressive
instincts’ should be rejected, for the plain truth (as the following pages
show) is that people can be violent for a bewildering variety of reasons.
Violence should also not be thought of as the opposite of legality, as
merely the ‘unlawful’ exercise of physical force (as Sidney Hook once
put it) ‘the illegal employment of methods of physical coercion for
5
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History (London 1984), ch. 2; Wini Breines and Linda Gordon, ‘The new scholarship
on family violence’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8, 3 (Spring
1983), pp. 490–553; and Liz Margolies and E. Leeder, ‘Violence at the door: treatment
of lesbian batterers’, Violence against Women, 1 (1995), pp. 139–57.
6
Robert Paul Wolff, ‘On violence’, Journal of Philosophy, 66 (October 1969),
pp. 601–16.
personal or group ends’.7 Finally, the term violence should not be

weighed down by elitist presumptions, such as the modern bourgeois
conviction that ‘violence against things’ is somehow equivalent to
‘violence against people’, as if ‘property’ equals ‘people’, as if entering
a military base by cutting through its reinforced steel fence and occu-
pying its runway is the same as dropping bombs on living people from
flying machines 10,000 metres up in the air.
Throughout this essay, the concept of violence has been used as
carefully – as ironically – as possible. Every effort has been made to
preserve its old-fashioned connotations, themselves traceable to the
earliest (late medieval) English usages of the term (from the Latin vio-
lentia: vis (force)) and latus (the past participle of ‘to carry’) to describe
‘the exercise of physical force’ against someone who is thereby ‘inter-
rupted or disturbed’ or ‘interfered with rudely or roughly’ or ‘dese-
crated, dishonoured, profaned, or defiled’. It is important to preserve
this older and more precise meaning of violence, and not just because
of its continuing pertinence in a world full of potential and actual
cruelty. Attempts (such as Johan Galtung’s) to craft ‘an extended def-
inition of violence’, to stretch its meaning to include anything –
from maiming human bodies and government discrimination against
minorities to debt burdens and sexist language – that impedes human
self-realisation effectively makes a nonsense of the concept. The term
violence comes to resemble an injustice detector. It measures every-
thing that stands in the way of ‘peace’. Violence is stretched to encom-
pass the personal, the institutional and the cultural and is then linked
to a questionable ontological account of ‘the satisfaction of human
needs’ – ‘survival needs’, ‘well-being needs’, ‘identity, meaning
needs’, ‘freedom needs’ – that makes violence indistinguishable from
7
Quoted in K. W. Grundy and M. A. Weinstein, The Ideologies of Violence (Columbus,
OH 1974), p. 12. Compare the retort of Herbert Marcuse against legalist definitions
of violence (New York Times Magazine, 27 October 1968, p. 90): ‘Thanks to a kind
of political linguistics, we never use the word violence to describe the actions of the
police, we never use the word violence to describe the actions of the Special Forces
in Vietnam. But the word is readily applied to the actions of students who defend
themselves from the police, burn cars or chop down trees.’
experiences like ‘harm’, ‘misery’, ‘unhappiness’, ‘alienation’, ‘cultural

discrimination’ and ‘repression’. To say that ‘violence is present when
human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and
mental realizations are below their potential realizations’,8 is paradox-
ically to wreck the concept. It makes it virtually synonymous with all
human failures to live happily, like angels, unburdened by the curse
of politics, within a universe of ‘symbiotic, equitable relations among
diverse partners’ held together by ‘cooperation, friendliness and love’.
Violence needs to be defined more soberly, with less normative
flourish. It is better understood as the more or less intended, direct
but unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with
the bodies of others, who are consequently made to suffer a series of
effects ranging from shock, speechlessness, mental torment, night-
mares, bruises, scratches, swellings, or headaches through to broken
bones, heart attacks, loss of body parts, or death. As we shall see, vio-
lence can take many forms, some of them highly paradoxical. Extreme
cases of enforced self-violation, such as suicide or euthanasia or dirty
protests that symbolically reduce the body to shit, urine and men-
strual blood, all fall within this category.9 So do acts that entail the
physical restraint of others, against their will, as when someone who
is acting violently is handcuffed and pinned to the floor under a boot,
or someone is knocked out so as to prevent them from rushing into
a blazing building, purportedly to rescue others. In each case, despite
these paradoxes, acts of violence always have an intentional com-
ponent. Gandhi’s well-known distinction between the non-violence
(ahimsā) of the surgeon wielding a scalpel and the selfish malevolence
of the thief and sadist accurately grasps the intentional quality of vio-
lence. Violent acts are consciously intended or half-intended acts of
8
Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, peace and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6
(1969), p. 168; see also his ‘Cultural violence’, Journal of Peace Research, 27, 3 (1990),
pp. 291–305.
9
See Begoña Aretxaga, ‘Dirty protest: symbolic overdetermination and gender in
Northern Ireland ethnic violence’, in Catherine Besteman (ed.), Violence. A Reader
(Houndsmills and New York 2002), pp. 169–92.
interference with the bodies of others; their limit or borderline cases,

as judges know well, are injuries caused to others’ bodies by reckless-
ness (wilful or otherwise) or institutional settings marked by bureau-
cratic violence, in which nobody seems directly responsible for the act
of violating the bodies of single individuals or those of whole groups.
So even when it comes dressed in velvet, violence is a relational
act in which the victim of violence is regarded, involuntarily, not as
a subject whose ‘otherness’ is recognised and respected, but rather
as a mere object potentially worthy of bodily harm, or even annihi-
lation. It is worth reiterating that violence is always ‘embodied’. It is
palpable. Violence directly touches the body of its victim, even when
(as in the deliberate poisoning or gassing or irradiating or besieging
of others) it takes time to make its mark. The embodied quality of
violence helps us to understand why the blocking off of a highway by
chanting demonstrators who lie down on the pavement is not an act
of violence. The ‘gentle removal’ of their bodies by big-fisted police
wielding truncheons, rubber bullets and pepper spray is. Such sayings
as ‘He laid violent hands on her’ or ‘He was in a violent temper’ remind
us that violence is unwanted physical interference with a subject – as
when (to take a more clear-cut case) a woman or child or man has their
thighs forced apart by a man who molests their bodies by stuffing their
genitals with a revoltingly alien organ.
It is worth remembering as well that acts of violence are not
always face-to-face, hand-to-hand conflicts. In our times, people kill
and are killed by proxy. Violence seems increasingly to be mediated
by large-scale institutions, like armies equipped with state-of-the-art
surveillance and monitoring and killing equipment. These institu-
tions of violence have the effect of blurring the intentions and camou-
flaging the culpable negligence and responsibility of the violent. Those
who inflict physical pain and suffering upon others do so not because
they are thugs and sadists (although they may be this), but because
they are trained in the habits and skills of behaving in accordance with
the logic and imperatives of the institutional system in which they
are operating. Violence tends to become ‘anonymous’. Harm earns
the status of a profession. But it remains violence, nonetheless. The

victims are still physically or mentally assaulted by actors who act:
they programme software, press buttons, tap keyboards, fill out forms,
make decisions around tables, load weapons, grease engines and fly
aircraft, and they do so with at least some awareness that what they
are doing may well, however directly or indirectly, have effects that
are regarded by others as violent. This trend towards ‘institutional
violence’ certainly includes all the forms of industrialised killing of
the past century.10 It also encompasses the cases analysed by scholars
such as Michel Foucault, in which the bodies of subjects are deliber-
ately confined, against their will but in the name of their ‘improve-
ment’, in houses of discipline and punishment in which, so to say,
violence is redeployed from public sites of punishment – ‘privatised’,
sanitised, and camouflaged within the walls of a prison, hospital or
asylum, sometimes with a smile.11
To emphasise the unwanted character of violence implies that
violence is one – extreme – form of the denial of a subject’s freedom
to act in and upon the world. However that subjectivity and free-
dom are defined – narrowly ‘liberal’ or ‘property-centred’ or ‘Euro-
pean’ ways of life are not presumed in this discussion – violence
obstructs subjects’ bodily motion. It silences them as well. Violence
has been interpreted as a form of communication, and it is true that it
always comes wrapped within a matrix of specialised language rules
and speech acts.12 Yet those who are violated always slip beneath
the surface of their own speech. They drown in the awful noise of
violence.13 They then suffer their own silence, if only for a fleeting
10
See Jean Claude Pressac and Robert-Jan Van Pelt, ‘The machinery of mass murder
at Auschwitz’ and Andrzej Strzelecki, ‘The plunder of victims and their corpses’, in
Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Bloomington 1994), pp. 183–245, 246–66; and Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst:
The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York 1995).
11
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London 1977).
12
Birinder Pal Singh, Violence as Political Discourse (Shimla 2002), p. 32.
13
‘Noise. That’s the first word that comes into my mind when I think of the last
ten years’, writes David Grossman of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Death as a
Way of Life. Israel Ten Years After Oslo (New York 2003), p. vii. ‘So much noise.
moment, before they scream. Sometimes their muteness is forever.

Violence is world-destroying. It cuts the tongue, and the pain that is
felt is partly due to this dissection of speech from the body. Kafka’s
account (in The Penal Colony) of the clever machine that kills its vic-
tims by forcible redescription accurately grasps this point: just as that
device equipped with inkjets inscribes the name of the crime over the
victim’s body, even as it bleeds to death, so those who are violent rob
their victims of their bodily and linguistic integrity. Violence is theft.
The world of the violated is narrowed to the space of the inexpress-
ible pain and suffering that is inflicted; the world of the violators is
correspondingly enlarged, so that for at least a moment, extracting
all power from their victims, they rule absolutely.14 That vast power
discrepancy shows why violence is incompatible with the civil soci-
ety and political democracy rules of complex liberty, solidarity and
equality of citizens. When individual citizens are violated, they expe-
rience interference with their bodies, which may consequently suffer
damage, physically, linguistically and psychically. Note that violence
affects the bodies of individuals. While various collective identities of
a democracy are damaged or annihilated when its constituent mem-
bers are violated – violence can destroy the mutual interdependence
of the living, the dead, even the unborn – violence only has this effect
because ultimately it bears down on and threatens embodied individ-
uals, who are treated as mere objects, as bodies deemed worthy of a
kick and a punch, or a knife, a bullet or a bomb.
Those individuals who experience violence against them find in
effect that they are treated, as Aristotle put it, as ‘a solitary advanced
piece in a game of draughts’, or (as he says elsewhere) like a wild ani-
mal ‘meant to be hunted’.15 Aristotle’s formulation of course supposed
Gunshots and shouts, incendiary words and mournful laments, and explosions and
demonstrations, and heaps of clichés and special broadcasts from the scenes of terror-
ist attacks, and calls for revenge and the throb of helicopters above and the screeching
sirens of ambulances and the frantic rings of the telephone after each incident.’
14
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York 1985).
15
Aristotle, Politics, bk. 1, ch. 2, 1253a, and bk. 7, ch. 2, 1324b.
the inevitability of violence within both the pre-political realm of the

oikos and the extra-political ‘barbarian’ world beyond the polis. ‘The
world would be a curious place’, he remarked, ‘if it did not include
some elements meant to be free, as well as some that are meant to
be subject to control; and if that is its nature any attempt to estab-
lish control should be confined to the elements meant for control,
and not extended to all.’16 This Aristotelean distinction between the
(violence-ridden) realm of necessity and the (pacified) realm of freedom
needs to be abandoned.17 And yet Aristotle’s basic insight that vio-
lence instrumentalises potentially speaking and interacting subjects
remains compelling. Rephrased in language that he would not have
properly understood: a democratic order protected and supported by
publicly accountable state institutions implies the existence of speak-
ing and peacefully interacting subjects, whereas the (at least tempo-
rary) effect of violence is to render them mute objects – even to herd
them into death’s cave.
The search for definitions may be fraught, but at the very least
it shows that the ambiguous term ‘violence’, like all concepts within
the human sciences, is idealtypisch, which is to say that it selectively
highlights certain aspects of reality, which nowhere exist in the pure
form suggested by the concept. So long as it continues to be used, the
concept of violence (Gewalt, himsā, violenza, nasilje, bou ryoku, ūnf)
will for that reason of selectivity – and the complicated ethical issues
it raises – forever remain controversial, especially under democratic
conditions. Smart and street-wise questions will always be asked: is
a bank robber’s accomplice who wants the robber to beat him up in
order to throw the police off the scent an object of violence? Did the
drunk driver who ran into a cyclist commit an act of violence? What
about the elderly shopper knocked to the pavement by a careless group
16
Ibid., bk. 7, ch. 2, 1324b; cf. bk. 7, ch. 14, 1333a–4a.
17
John Keane, Public Life and Late Capitalism (Cambridge 1984); ‘Structural transfor-
mations of the public sphere’, in Margaret Scammell and Holli Semetko (eds.), The
Media, Journalism and Democracy (Aldershot and Burlington, VT 2000), pp. 53–74;
and On Communicative Abundance (London 1999).
of head-phoned youths horsing around? Or the British soldier who

forcibly entered the dwellings of a Muslim, with sniffer dogs on the
leash?
Such questions are to be welcomed, and not only in courts of
law, essentially because a razor-sharp sense of complexity helps alert
democracies to the contingent character of violence in its various
forms. Democracies thrive on (and are in turn troubled by) the ‘dena-
turing’ of violence, understandably so when it is considered that the
‘purest’ forms of violence are undoubtedly those that result in invol-
untary death. Death is potentially the ultimate consequence of an
act of violence. Of course, for each individual, death is inescapably
a terminus and a reference point on the map of life. It marks out
the intersection of the finite and the infinite. Death can serve as the
point from which individuals evaluate their lives unencumbered by
the pressures of the world. They are able to reflect upon what they
have or have not achieved; what they have become; and what might
be in store for them. In this sense, death is at the same time birth, for
it is precisely in death that life reaches its apogee. There are of course
lots of different ways of dying. Lucky are those who can die among
friends or relatives, in dignity, photographed or filmed with a look of
indefinable authority on their brave faces. Unlucky are those – there
have been several hundred millions during the past century alone –
who are robbed of an ‘individual death’ (Rainer Maria Rilke) by an act
of violence. Their deaths are forced, and anonymous. It is as if they
die twice; their own deaths die a sudden death, stealing from them the
possibility of taking stock of their lives, past, present and future. There
are lots of different ways in which the violent can kill, but there is
only one result: you are dead, you are no more, you are no longer to be
found anywhere. For someone, somewhere, you may become a statis-
tic. And, if you are lucky, your photograph and treasured belongings
will be held in perpetuity by relatives, friends, colleagues or lovers.
But the truth is that those who suffer violent death have been pushed
over the edge. Death is their unwanted centre of gravity. It marks the
end of their fall. They are no longer on the streets. They are no longer
on the food ration lists, not in the water and bread queues, no longer
in their beds, kitchens or in the arms of their loved ones. They are
just a blood-stained body covered in ants and flies. They are a shallow
grave dug in a park or a corpse in a sports stadium, perhaps a twisted
heap in the desert, or a motionless hulk on a stone slab – end of story.
Civilisation
Civility [from civil] . . . Freedom from barbarity; the state of being

civilised . . . Politeness; complaisance; elegance of Behaviour . . . Rule of
decency; practice of politeness . . .
Samuel Johnson (1786)
rediscovering civil society

Like all terms in our language, violence has a relational quality. It
obviously takes on its meanings and assumes significance for us inso-
far as it is enmeshed within a wider web of other terms and concepts
that stand in relationships of similarity and difference. The old con-
trast between violence and a ‘civil’ or ‘civilised’ society is a case in
point. Seen against the backdrop of a long century of organised cru-
elty and the new triangle of violence in which our world is now living,
it is little wonder that there has been, in recent years, a remarkable
renaissance of interest in the idea of civil society – even expressed
hopes for the formation of a global civil society.1 Orwell did not fore-
see this innovation, and it is interesting to speculate whether his
well-known pessimism about the future might have been tempered by
the normative ideal of a civil society, to which his political writings
are certainly close. Carefully interpreted, the concept of civil soci-
ety has a close affinity with the issues of violence and democracy.
This is so for at least four assorted reasons: the old-fashioned, still-
living connotative links between the word civil (‘polite, obliging, not
rude’, ‘not military’) and the ideal of non-violence; the global flour-
ishing of the concept of civil society during recent decades within
1
The following discussion presupposes some familiarity with my Global Civil Soci-
ety? (Cambridge and New York 2003); Democracy and Civil Society. On the Predica-
ments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of
Controlling Social and Political Power (London and New York 1998); Civil Society
and the State. New European Perspectives (London and New York 1998); and Civil
Society: Old Images, New Visions (London and Stanford 1998).
c i v i l i s at i o n 43
democratic movements opposed to government by violence; the fact

that in modern times every recorded example of durable democratic
institutions and ways of life has rested upon a solid foundation of civil
society; and the uncomfortable empirical fact that every known civil
society has been plagued by tendencies towards cruelty that openly
contradict its democratic potential, especially its normative vision of
a social order structured by values like openness, equality, difference
and non-violent solidarity.
The tight links between the themes of violence and civil soci-
ety and democracy are not always spotted. Consider the surprising
silence about violence within Ernest Gellner’s Conditions of Liberty:
Civil Society and its Rivals (1994). Gellner presents a good summary
case for the fundamental contemporary relevance of the civil society
perspective in the social and political sciences. ‘Civil Society’ (the
phrase is capitalised throughout by him), ‘is that set of diverse non-
governmental institutions which is strong enough to counterbalance
the state and, while not preventing the state from fulfilling its role of
keeper of the peace and arbitrator between major interests, can nev-
ertheless prevent it from dominating and atomizing the rest of soci-
ety.’2 Gellner has an unfortunate tendency to conflate different forms
of civil society and to speak of civil society in economistic terms. His
thesis that Muslim societies are incapable of developing civil society
institutions is deeply flawed, sometimes to the point where the whole
book reads like a nineteenth-century Orientalist tract. Yet Gellner’s
account of civil society makes the clear and powerful point that the
contemporary popularity of the term is traceable to the fact that, wher-
ever it appears, civil society, ideal-typically conceived, is a site of com-
plexity, choice and dynamism, and that it is therefore the enemy of
all forms of political despotism.
Gellner emphasises that the opposition of civil society to
political despotism was especially strong under the crisis-ridden,
2
All quotations are from Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and its
Rivals (London 1994).
twentieth-century totalitarian regimes of the Soviet type, or what

he calls ‘Caesaro-Papism-Mammonism’. The main feature of these
regimes was a ‘near-total fusion of the political, ideological and eco-
nomic hierarchies’. Soviet totalitarianism was driven by the avowed
aim of creating a new socialist man and woman emancipated from the
evils of capitalism: possessive individualism, commodity fetishism,
and subservience based upon waged labour. It manifestly failed to
achieve any of these aims, Gellner argues, partly because it culti-
vated only cynical, conformist subjects. Homo sovieticus was skilled
at double-talk, yet the sad fact is that these ‘individualists-without-
opportunity’ were incapable of effective enterprise, not least because
they were imprisoned in a world ‘where it was barely possible – or lit-
erally not possible at all – to found a philatelic club without political
supervision’.
Then came the annus mirabilis 1989. The largely non-violent
revolutions that erupted in the central-eastern half of Europe in the
autumn of that year put paid to this system. Not only did these ‘velvet’
revolutions represent a practical victory for the forces of the emerg-
ing civil society over the totalitarian regimes of the Brezhnevite or
Titoist type; they also vindicated the intellectual shift of emphasis
towards the category of civil society. But why did the downtrodden
and humiliated – some of them in some countries, at least – find them-
selves attracted to the utopia of civil society? Why did they come bit-
terly to resent its absence, to feel its lack as ‘an aching void’? Gellner
couches his answers primarily in terms of a theory of the irreversible
transition from agricultural to industrial orders. Living in complex,
market-driven industrial orders, we have come to accept civil society
as ‘second-nature’. So we are the fruit of what we must desire and
endorse. Strivings for civil society have become encoded within our
historical traditions. Civil society has become part of our make-up.
We actually like it, and therefore have no desire to live under any form
of state despotism or tradition-bound communitarianism. ‘Civil Soci-
ety . . . seems linked to our historical destiny’, he writes. ‘A return to
stagnant traditional agrarian society is not possible; so, industrialism

being our manifest destiny, we are thereby also committed to its social
corollaries.’
It may be objected that Gellner is too strongly tempted to talk
in such abstractions as ‘we’ and that he pays too little attention
to the uneven spatial and temporal distribution of the civil society
traditions in which he claims we are steeped. These weighty objec-
tions can be skipped, in order to concentrate upon Gellner’s closely
related, ‘structuralist’ argument that a civil society is a necessary con-
dition of liberty. Gellner reiterates the familiar point that civil soci-
ety is not a stifling segmentary community ridden with cousins and
rituals and other forms of ascribed identity. Civil society ‘is based
on the separation of the polity from economic and social life’ and
‘the absence of domination of social life by the power-wielders’. It
is exactly this ‘spatial’ independence of civil society, its ability to
act at a distance from political rulers, that enables the subjects of
civil society to become confident, self-transforming citizens. Not only
does the sheer complexity and diversity of patterns of life within civil
society militate against essentialist notions of the human condition
(‘the inhabitant of Civil Society is radically distinct from members of
other kinds of society. He is not man-as-such [sic]’, writes Gellner).
Among the additional charms of civil society is that its multiplicity
of activities and standards of excellence fosters the illusion of equality
of opportunity. Hence, it cultivates, and thrives upon, the struggle for
self-improvement. ‘Civil Society . . . allows quite a lot of people to
believe themselves to be at the top of the ladder, because there are so
many independent ladders, and each person can think that the ladder
on which he [sic] is well placed is the one that really matters.’
incivility
Gellner’s positive characterisation of civil society as a realm of free-
dom correctly highlights its basic value as a condition of democracy.
Where there is no civil society there cannot be citizens with capacities
to choose their identities, entitlements and duties within a publicly

accountable, political-legal framework. His characterisation of civil
society is nonetheless myopic, indeed symptomatic of a virtually uni-
versal habit among its recent friends to idealise its peaceful promo-
tion of citizens’ freedom. There is much talk of a ‘global associational
revolution’, of civil society as ‘that domain in which people voluntar-
ily associate to express themselves’, as the sphere supportive of core
values like ‘minimising violence, maximising economic well-being,
realising social and political justice, and upholding environmental
quality’.3 Various negative tendencies of civil society – ranging from
confusions about the limits of party competition and the dissembling
role of communications media to chronic unemployment and sexual
discrimination within and outside households – are overlooked. There
is also a striking omission from Gellner’s account – and most other
contemporary accounts – of the problem of incivility, the extreme
case of which can be called an uncivil society, a type of social order
torn apart by extreme forms of violence.
Further reflection upon this problem is essential, even if the
terms ‘incivility’ and ‘uncivil society’ are strange-sounding, mal-
adroit, at worst malapropisms, at best anachronisms, or so it seems.
English-language dictionaries tell us that the root word ‘uncivility’ is
now virtually obsolete. The sixteenth-century adjective ‘uncivil’, we
are told, refers to behaviour which is ‘contrary to civil well-being’,
or ‘barbarous’, ‘unrefined’, ‘indecorous’, improper’, ‘unmannerly’ and
‘impolite’. It was in this sense that country folk spoke of ‘bad and
uncivill Husbandry’ (1632) or Shakespeare instructed (in Two Gentle-
men of Verona (1591)) one of his characters to command: ‘Ruffian:
let goe that rude uncivill touch.’ During the eighteenth century, this
strange-sounding talk of ‘uncivility’ became the subject of philosoph-
ical and literary analysis – during precisely the same period when dis-
courses on ‘civil society’ (societas civilis, koinōnia politiké, société
3
These quotations are drawn from several leading sources of ‘civil society purism’, as
discussed in my Global Civil Society?, especially pp. 57ff.
civile, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Civill Society, società civile) were

flourishing, and when the traditional meaning of this old concept as a
synonym for peaceful, well-ordered political association experienced
a lengthy process of ‘disordering’ and ‘subdivision’, such that civil
society and the state, traditionally linked by the relational concept of
societas civilis, came to be seen as different entities.
The old philosophic concern with uncivility is evident in the
travel writings of the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift, himself a pro-
tagonist of the old-fashioned but commonplace eighteenth-century
meaning of civil society as a politically well-regulated community
devoid of violence. Swift’s preoccupation with violence stands in
stark contrast to the odd silence about violence in recent accounts
of civil society. His concern is powerfully evident in the records of
his frequent journeys through the Irish countryside, during which
he often observed that the bulk of its inhabitants was ‘uncivil’ com-
pared with the refined islands of English-speaking civility of his com-
pradore friends and acquaintances living in town and country man-
sions. Swift’s travel reports conjure up the society of unsafe journeys
of the medieval period, when setting out meant making a will (as
in the departure of Anne Vercos in Paul Louis Claudel’s L’Annonce
faite à Marie), and travelling itself meant crossing the paths of wild
animals, vagabonds and bandits.
Swift’s presumption that the English oligarchy was a model civil
nation is reflected in his descriptions of the summers spent away
from his native Dublin, usually in the company of a rural gentry or
clergy living in sanctuaries of Anglican refinement and comfort. ‘I hate
Dublin, and love the Retirement here, and the Civility of my Hosts’,
he wrote to his friend Thomas Sheridan from the estate of Sir Arthur
and Lady Acheson, at Market-hill, County Armagh in the summer
of 1728. Swift liked to think of his times as caught up in a momen-
tous struggle between premodern barbarity and modern civility. The
struggle unfolded spatially, resembling a hostile geographic division
of territory, in which the traveller who moved from the zone of civil-
ity across into the realm of incivility had the unusual experience
of going back in time by rushing forward through space. ‘You will

find what a quick change I made in seven days from London’, he
told Alexander Pope after returning to the comfort of his residence
in his native Dublin. He described moving ‘through many nations
and languages unknown to the civilised world. And I have often
reflected in how few hours, with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man
may come among a people as unknown to him as the Antipodes.’
Contact with the uncivilised in an Ireland where ‘Politeness is as
much a Stranger as Cleanlyness’ was both fascinating and repulsive.
Swift’s description of the then village of Kilkenny was typical of his
view of Ireland as a land largely filled with bestial, dung-throwing
Yahoos:
a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations; filthy cabins,

miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape;
one insolent ignorant oppressive squire to be found in twenty
miles riding; a parish church to be found only in a summer-day’s
journey, in comparison of which, an English farmer’s barn is a
cathedral; a bog of fifteen miles round; every meadow a slough,
and every hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh; and every male
and female, from the farmer, inclusive to the day-labourer,
infallibly a thief, and consequently a beggar, which in this island
are terms convertible.4
Swift’s observations about ‘uncivility’ echoed the much older

principle of ‘civility’ elaborated in sixteenth-century Italian courts
and seventeenth-century Parisian salons. This principle supposed that
the everyday interactions of men may, in such matters as commerce
4
The quotations are respectively from letters written by Jonathan Swift to the Rev-
erend Thomas Sheridan (Market-hill, 2 August 1728); to Alexander Pope (Dublin,
August 1726); to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh (7 August 1722); and to Dean John Bran-
dreth (30 June 1732), in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams,
5 vols. (Oxford, 1962–72), vol. III, p. 296; ibid., p. 158; vol. II, p. 433; and vol. IV, p. 34.
Joseph McMinnis, Jonathan’s Travels. Swift and Ireland (Belfast and New York 1994)
is a good account of Swift’s life from a traveller’s viewpoint.
and love, not only be freed from the threat of violence – from inci-
vility – but also become a source of human pleasure. Men are not
naturally violent. They can learn to shake hands. Their aggression
may be overcome by artificial conventions, such as ‘refined’ speech,
‘polite’ manners, ‘effeminate’ styles of dress (wigs with long curls,
jewels, ribbons, sinously high-heeled pumps), all of which serve to
distance individuals from uncivil habits variously dubbed ‘rustic’,
‘crude’, ‘rude’ or ‘unpolished’. During this period, the French verb
civiliser was used to name this process. Civiliser is ‘to bring to civility,
to make manners mild and civil’ under ‘good government’ and ‘good
laws’.5 Mirabeau’s L’Ami des hommes ou Traité de la population
(1756), the first French text to use the new-fangled word civilisation,
added that those who enjoyed a reputation for civility were consid-
ered exemplars of ‘confraternity’ or sociabilité; they were ‘polished’
men whose hearts had been softened, deflected from the temptations
of taking violent revenge against others.
Within this literature, there was by no means general agree-
ment that resistance to incivility was a good thing. The cultivation of
civility as an antidote to incivility bred controversy. There were, for
example, abundant complaints about the hypocrisy of civility, in par-
ticular because of the role it played in masking the conniving egoism
and violence of men with a reputation for refined manners. Mahatma
Gandhi’s famous remark that the idea of British civilisation would
be a good one stands towards the end of a long line of complaints
of this sort, of which Novalis’s complaint about the ‘wild civilised
barbarism’ of Europe, Diderot’s comments on the ‘insulting polite-
ness’ of those on high, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sarcastic attack
on Hobbes and modern civil societies are among the most famous.
‘I open the books on Right and on ethics; I listen to the professors
5
See Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle (Paris
1925), vol. II, p. 302; and also the various entries around ‘Zivilisation’ in Deutsches
Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig 1956), vol. XV,
pp. 1723–38.
and jurists; and, my mind full of their seductive doctrines, I admire

the peace and justice established by the civil order’, wrote Rousseau,
who in the same breath insisted that polite or ‘polished’ civility is
not a virtue, but rather a form of artifice that serves to adorn villainy.
Civility is polite barbarism. ‘I bless the wisdom of our political insti-
tutions’, continued Rousseau, ‘and, knowing myself a citizen, cease
to lament I am a man. Thoroughly instructed as to my duties and my
happiness, I close the book, step out of the lecture room, and look
around me.’ Just as blood is more visible on white gloves, so civility
makes horror appear more terrible. ‘I see wretched nations groaning
beneath a yoke of iron’, concluded Rousseau. ‘I see mankind ground
down by a handful of oppressors. I see a famished mob, worn down
by sufferings and famine, while the rich drink the blood and tears of
their victims at their ease. I see on every side the strong armed with
the terrible powers of the Law against the weak.’6
Not only were there attacks on the double standards of civility.
There were attempts – well illustrated by the later Jonathan Swift’s
questioning of English civility in defence of Irish independence – to
turn the tables on the powerful by emphasising that their civility
was the ally of cruel arrogance, that it had the unintended effect of
producing and reproducing incivility among the powerless, the key
implication being that the powerful must somehow change their ways
and let the ‘uncivilised’ find their own path to civility. The vigor-
ous eighteenth-century discussion of cannibalism is revealing of this
shift. There were of course those who straightforwardly condemned
the practice as a form of ‘inhuman, hellish Brutality’ (Defoe) that fell
far short of the superior European standards of ‘civilisation’; and there
were other observers (Voltaire’s Candide [1759] counts as an example)
who reacted to talk of cannibalism with coyness and witty sangfroid.
But striking in retrospect is the way in which the whole subject of
6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Fragments of an essay on the state of war’ (written circa
1752), in A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and the State of War
(London 1917), pp. 124–5. (The original is reprinted in C. E. Vaughan (ed.), Political
Writings of J. J. Rousseau, vol. I, pp. 293–307.)
anthropophagy during this period is used by the protagonists of civil-

ity to appeal to Europeans to open their eyes, to see with different eyes,
to recognise (as Georg Forster famously summarised the point after
travelling with Captain Cook around the world) that the cannibalism
practised by the Maori peoples was nothing compared with the bar-
barism of Spanish ‘civilisers’ who regularly throw Indian babies to the
dogs.7 From that type of sentiment it was only a short step to the bit-
ing satirical recommendation of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal
for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to
their Parents or the Country (1729): that the incivility built into the
European civilising process presented new opportunities for the pow-
erful, that incivility should be commercially exploited by harvesting
the bodies of infants as food for the rich.
Swift’s attack on double standards, his tongue-in-cheek call
for greater public honesty about barbarism in the heartlands of the
‘civilised’ world, caused a stir, in part no doubt because it exploited
the ongoing fears of violence that lurked within the early modern
concern with civility. Incivility was the ghost that haunted civil soci-
ety. In this respect, civilisation was normally valued as a long-term
project charged with discharging and sublimating violence; incivility
was the permanent – beatable – enemy of civil society. To speak of
‘civilisation’ during this period is to refer to an incomplete historical
process, in which civility, a static term, was both the aim and out-
come of the transformation of ‘uncivil’ into ‘civil’ behaviour. From
this thesis it was merely a short step away from the thought that the
civilising process was a march through stages of gradually increasing
perfection. During the eighteenth century, the word civilisation con-
notes both a fundamental process of history and the end result of that
7
The boomerang effects of European civility upon Europe itself are examined in Claude
Rawson, ‘Savages noble and ignoble: natives, cannibals, third parties, and others
in South Pacific narratives by Gulliver, Bougainville, and Diderot, with notes on
the Encyclopédie and on Voltaire’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (November 1994),
pp. 168–97. Some nineteenth-century developments are examined in Catherine Hall,
Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867
(Cambridge 2002).
process, in which the distinction between the advances of present-

day civilisation and the actual or hypothetical primitive primordial
state (called variously ‘nature’, ‘barbarism, ‘rudeness’ or ‘savagery’)
becomes ever clearer. The privileged classes of Europe represent them-
selves as treading a path stretching from primitive barbarism through
the present half-civilised condition of humanity towards perfection
through education and refinement.
The journey towards civilisation was seen to be a slow but
steady elimination of violence from human affairs, as Adam Ferguson,
influenced by lectures delivered by Adam Smith in 1752, emphasised
when first using the word civilisation in English. Ferguson describes
the process of civilisation as progress from rudeness to refinement, in
which the contemporary ‘civil society’ is understood as a ‘polished’
and ‘refined’ form of society with ‘regular government and political
subordination’. Ferguson emphasised that ‘the epithets of civilised or
of polished’ properly refer to ‘modern nations’ marked by the discre-
tionary use of violence, and that these nations stand in contrast to
‘barbarous or rude’ peoples. In barbarous nations, Ferguson insisted,
‘quarrelling had no rules but the immediate dictates of passion, which
ended in words of reproach, in violence, and blows’. Tides of violence
flooded the field of government as well. ‘When they took arms in the
divisions of faction, the prevailing party supported itself by expelling
their opponents, by proscriptions, and bloodshed. The usurper endeav-
oured to maintain his station by the most violent and prompt execu-
tions. He was opposed, in his turn, by conspiracies and assassinations,
in which the most respectable citizens were ready to use the dagger.’
Barbarous nations were equally rude in the conduct of war. ‘Cities
were razed, or inslaved; the captive sold, mutilated, or condemned
to die.’ By contrast, Ferguson noted, civilised or polished nations had
‘gone some way in extruding crudely violent scenes’ from the stage
of contemporary life. ‘We have improved on the laws of war, and
on the lenitives which have been devised to soften its rigours’, he
wrote. ‘We have mingled politeness with the use of the sword; we
have learned to make war under the stipulations of treaties and car-
tels, and trust to the faith of an enemy whose ruin we meditate.’
Civilised societies are guided by the principle of ‘employing of force,
only for the obtaining of justice, and for the preservation of national
rights’.8
8
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh 1767), especially
pt. I, sect. 4 (‘Of the principles of war and dissension’), pp. 29–37, pt. 2 (‘Of the history
of rude nations’), pp. 112–64; and pt. 3, sect. 6 (‘Of civil liberty’), pp. 236–56.
Barbarism?
It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and

yet . . . it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday
could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our
children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s
mind: this is a temptation one must resist.
Primo Levi (1988)
state violence
Among the weaknesses of Ferguson’s type of eighteenth-century inter-
pretation of the problem of violence and civil society is its more or
less secret commitment to an evolutionary or teleological understand-
ing of history as a process of transformation from ‘rude’ societies to
‘civilised’ societies. Although Ferguson worried about the possible
relapse into barbarism,1 his overall approach presumed that modern
times are superior to earlier eras of rudeness, exactly because – the
point is important for contemporary democracies – violence is poten-
tially removable from significant areas of social and political life. The
presumed evolutionary spiral is explicit in the works of Scottish col-
leagues of Ferguson – such as James Dunbar’s Essays on the History
of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780) and John Logan’s
Elements of the Philosophy of History (1781) – who both treat of vio-
lence as the antithesis of civil society and assume, optimistically, that
violence is on the wane in modern civil societies.
In its time, this presumptuous optimism helped to kill off old
perceptions about the eternal cycles of violence in human affairs.2 Its
1
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh 1767), pt. 6,
sects. 3–4 (‘Of the corruption incident to polished nations’), pp. 382–401.
2
An example is the poem by Ihean de Mehune cited in George Puttenham, The
Arte of English Poesie (London 1589), pp. 173–4: ‘Peace makes plenty, plenty makes
pride,/ Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings warre:/ Warre brings spoile, and spoile
povertie,/ Povertie pacience, and pacience peace:/ So peace brings warre and warre
brings peace.’
b a r b a r i s m ? 55
optimism today remains of interest and consequence, since precisely

the same premise is invisibly at work in latter-day ‘purist’ accounts
of civil society, Gellner’s included.3 The premise is arguably rendered
both questionable and undesirable, not only by the terrible crimes
of state violence committed during the past century, but also by the
dangerous triangle of violence of our times. Evolutionary optimism
is invalidated by three other basic trends: the chronic persistence of
violence within all extant civil societies; the (not unrelated) perma-
nent possibility that civil societies can and do regress into uncivil
societies; and the related, but opposite trend, for the first time on any
scale, of a new civility politics that aims to publicise and eradicate
such disparate phenomena as murder and rape, genocide and nuclear
war, the violence of discipinary institutions, cruelty to animals, child
abuse and capital punishment. For the purpose of refining present-
day understandings of civil society and probing more deeply into the
subject of violence and democracy, let us examine these complicating
trends and counter-trends in more detail.
Within the human sciences of the past generation, Norbert Elias
did more than anybody to stimulate awareness of the dialectics – the
strengths and weaknesses – of modern civil societies. His account of
the so-called ‘civilising process’ remains of vital importance to any
effort to think in fresh ways about democracy and violence. Compa-
rable in aim and scope to the older work of Rondelet, Tocqueville and
others, his key work, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939),4 traces
the transformation in western Europe of the warlike, knightly order of
late medieval society into a state-building court society whose thresh-
old of shame and embarrassment about violence was qualitatively
higher. From the sixteenth century onwards, particularly in the rul-
ing circles of the courteoisie, Elias shows, social standards of conduct
3
John Keane, Global Civil Society? (Cambridge and New York 2003).
4
See C. Haroche, ‘La civilité et la politesse – des objets négligés de la sociologie poli-
tique’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 94 (1993), pp. 97–120. The key work of
Norbert Elias referred to here is Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische
und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Basel 1939).
and sentiment began to change drastically. Codes of conduct became

stricter, more differentiated and all-embracing, but also more temper-
ate. Within this ‘habitus’ of the courteoisie, spontaneous behaviour
was repressed. Excesses of self-castigation and self-indulgence were
banished. Restraint was internalised. Social life underwent pacifica-
tion. Men who had once eaten from the same dish, or drunk from the
same cup, or spat or relieved themselves in each other’s presence came
to be separated by a new wall of restraint and embarrassment at the
bodily functions of others. They learned to shake hands and to keep
calm under duress. Physical impulses (such as farting, defaecating,
urinating, nudity itself) were checked by self-imposed prohibitions
that followed new rules of privacy. Prudery came to surround wed-
ding ceremonies, prostitution and discussions of sexual matters. Lan-
guage became more delicate. Even death, particularly violent death,
became an embarrassment to the living. To express pleasure in vio-
lence, torturing and mutilating one’s opponents in battle, for instance,
came to be regarded as rudeness. So too did the harbouring of grudges
and the angry desire for revenge. Elias shows that this transformation
was closely related to the construction of territorial states – particu-
larly to the application of stricter controls of the warrior classes and
the ‘courtisation’ of the nobles. Later, highly unevenly, the civilised
manners of the courteoisie percolated ‘downwards’ into the ranks of
the urban bourgeoisie and (though heavily contested) the peasant and
working classes. The whole process found its expression in a new term
launched by Erasmus of Rotterdam – the term ‘civility’ – which later
gave rise to the verb ‘to civilise’. Soon there was a family of terms –
civil, civilised, civility, civilisation, civism – that were used in many
other countries as symbols of the new struggle to refine and polish
manners.
Subsequent historical research suggests that Elias’s general
thesis is quite plausible, that this period in western Europe indeed
saw a considerable reduction of violence both within the ranks of
the dominant classes and within everyday social relations more
generally.5 Elias handles the implications of this finding with some

subtlety. It is true that his work contains traces of the eighteenth-
century progressivist view of civility. Symptomatic is his general
neglect of the ways in which the civilising process redeployed, sani-
tised and camouflaged disciplinary and other violence without nec-
essarily diminishing it.6 The nineteenth-century reduction of capital
offences and the abolition of public hangings in 1868 in England, for
example, can hardly be attributed to the growing practical triumph
of liberal civility.7 There were many who found themselves ashamed
of public displays of violence, certainly. But prosecutions and capital
convictions had risen so dramatically in the early nineteenth century
that by the 1830s more than 90 per cent of death sentences were not
carried out lest the English landscape be clogged with gibbets, and
not primarily because of mounting sympathy among ‘the civilised’
classes for the condemned. Similarly, the privatisation of hangings,
their removal from the public eye, beginning with the abolition in
England of the Tyburn procession in 1783 to the dismantling of scaf-
folds inside prison walls in 1868, had little to do with a principled
commitment to civility. The transfer of executions indoors, the hiding
away of violence from public eyes, was often seen by its advocates as a
means of dampening public attacks on the whole dirty business of cap-
ital punishment. One consequence was that hanging arguably became
more cruel, since the abolition of public displays of violence meant
that felons were from here on denied the active sympathy formerly
extended to them by onlookers. Those whose hourglasses had been
turned for the last time were now left to face death alone, in the hope –
pious evangelicals calculated – that their sinful souls would repent.
5
Examples include Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800
(Cambridge and New York 2001); and Eric A. Johnson and Eric H. Monkkonen (eds.),
The Civilisation of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages
(Urbana 1996).
6
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (London 1977).
7
V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree. Execution and the English People, 1770–1868
(Oxford 1994).
Despite such oversights, Elias consistently points out that the

western European civilising process was and remains historically con-
tingent. It is a fragile historical episode linking the medieval and
contemporary modern European worlds. His reasoning is again quite
even-handed. Elias always considered that the modern civilising pro-
cess has brought definite gains. By creating violence-free islands of
social life, men and women have in effect learned to shake hands. Yet –
the point is not fully elaborated8 – he also notes that there were
other paths to other forms of ‘civility’ elsewhere on the earth, which
explains why Elias criticizes the tendency to use terms like ‘civilisa-
tion’ and ‘civil society’ normatively, as if they were synonymous with
the triumphs and achievements of modern Europe or ‘the West’ in the
wider world. He comments:
In 1798, as Napoleon sets off for Egypt, he shouts to his troops:

‘Soldiers, you are undertaking a conquest with incalculable
consequences for civilisation.’ Unlike the situation when the
concept was formed, nations from here on consider the process of
civilisation as completed within their own societies; they see
themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilisation to
others, as standard-bearers of civilisation in foreign lands. Of the
whole preceding process of civilisation nothing remains in their
consciousness except a vague residue. Its impact is understood
simply as an expression of their own higher gifts; the fact that, and
the question of how, during the course of many centuries, their
own civilised behaviour has been formed is of no interest.9
Elias convincingly warns that amnesia about the socio-genesis

of specifically European standards of civility can have (as it did in
8
Hartmut Kaelble, Europäer über Europa: die Entstehung des europäischen Selbst-
verständnisses im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main and New York 2001).
9
Elias, Uber den prozess der Zivilisation, vol. I, p. 63; and ‘Zivilisation’, in B. Schäfers
(ed.), Grundbegriffe der Soziologie, 3rd edn (Opladen 1992), pp. 382–7. On the more
general problem of the transferability of his theory of the civilising process see
Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: An Introduction (Oxford 1992), pp. 232–3.
Napoleon’s case) pompous and violent consequences. Civilisation is

not only taken for granted. It becomes synonymous with a superiority
complex that potentially regards others as inferiors, as indeed hap-
pened within the tiny courtly-aristocratic upper class of Europeans
who tried to lord over the rest of the world and considered themselves
as bearers of true ‘civilisation’. They were a social enclave intensely
proud of their achievements – Elias argues – despite clear evidence
that the originally European mode of civilisation suffered from self-
paralysis.
His emphasis upon the self-destructive qualities of the Euro-
pean civilising process is particularly important food for fresh thought
about violence and democracy. According to Elias, modern civil soci-
eties are chronically threatened by an exogenous source of incivility.
His reasoning can be summarised briefly: the modern civilising pro-
cess, he points out, is directly related to the formation and growth of
political classes – the French monarchy, the framers of the American
constitution, the twentieth-century champions of decolonisation –
that in their own way and using various means sought to disarm
competitor power groups, and to monopolise the means of violence
over a given territory and its inhabitants. The creation of the mod-
ern state – an impersonal, abstract entity that stands above and is
distinct from both the government of the day and the governed –
was both a precondition and effect of the civilising process. State-
builders developed standing professional armies to deal with armed
banditry, homicide and assaults, rape and riot. They codified crimi-
nal laws: the German Lands’ Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532),
France’s Criminal Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), and Philip II’s
Criminal Ordinance for the Spanish Netherlands (1570) are examples.
State-builders also sought to regulate their subjects’ lives through a
multitude of rules and ordinances governing such matters as dress and
sporting codes, gender relations, the incarceration of violent house-
hold members, tavern closure hours, duelling, smuggling and other
forms of organised crime. In each case, the job of the sovereign and
indivisible state apparatus was to put an end to social violence. Nasty,
dirty, uncivil habits were to be outlawed. The state was to wield a

monopoly of armed force over a population that would then enjoy
freedom from everyday violence precisely because it comes to regard
the state’s monopoly of violence as legal – as a legitimate monopoly
of violence.
Elias is aware that such concentrations of violence were heavily
contested through various forms of ‘collective bargaining by riot’.10
And while he is aware that in democratic countries violence is nor-
mally controlled and managed by elected governments, backed up
by the military and police as their administrative organs, he is con-
vinced that, like so many other human inventions, well-armed terri-
torial state institutions have had highly equivocal effects. According
to Elias, whose position on this point is close to the ‘realist’ school of
international relations, state-building resembles the invention of fire.
Just as the taming of fire favoured ‘civilised’ progress in the cooking of
food as well as the barbarian burning down of huts and houses, so the
political invention of armed territorial states is an utterly ambiguous
innovation. States are positively dangerous instruments of pacifica-
tion. They ensure (as Orwell said in ‘Rudyard Kipling’) that ‘men can
only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are
there to guard them’.11 On the one hand, within their given territo-
ries, states are peace-enforcing and peace-keeping agencies. The peace
enjoyed by political subjects assumes the form of state-controlled
and legalised violence, which releases individuals and groups from
the hellish reality (in Hobbes’s famous words) of ‘continuall feare,
and danger of violent death’. The exercise of violence consequently
becomes, at least in principle, predictable and – Hobbes disapproved
of this – democratically controllable. On the other hand – here is the
rub – the modern process of state-secured pacification is not extended
to the relationships among states. Despite inter-state negotiations,
10
E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth
century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 77–136.
11
George Orwell, ‘Rudyard Kipling’, Collected Essays and Journalism: 1940–1943
(London 1981), p. 581.
diplomacy and peace agreements, all states continue to be caught up

in a bellum omnium contra omnes. According to Elias, the modern
state is too civil by half. ‘As in every system of balances with mount-
ing competition and without a central monopoly, the powerful states
forming the primary axes of tensions within the system force each
other in an incessant spiral to extend and strengthen their power
position.’12 The implication is that war, whose essence is violence,
sparing the use of which under battle conditions is imbecility, con-
stantly threatens particular states’ monopoly of the means of violence
(in that they can be defeated militarily by their enemies abroad or by
civilian unrest at home). War in turn threatens the non-violent, civil
conditions enjoyed by the subjects of states. Elias’s point is that when
the power to deploy the means of violence is placed in the hands of a
few, and for the benefit of certain small groups, it can be used to make
war on other states and their populations. War and rumours of war are
omnipresent conditions of the civilising process.
Monopolists of the means of violence can turn life-threatening
weapons against their own subject populations. Rousseau’s remark
that ‘the whole life of kings, or of those on whom they shuffle off their
duties, is devoted solely to two objects: to extend their rule beyond
their frontiers and to make it more absolute within them’13 applies
to the whole of the modern period of territorial state-building. While
early empires and tributary regimes normally attempted to ensure
the obedience of their subjects and to extract from them as much
surplus as possible, they frequently lacked the resources for perma-
nently pulverising the societies they attempted to control. They con-
sequently resorted often to the paradoxical strategy of allowing local
communities and whole regions to administer themselves, in return
for which the political authorities obliged them to supply produce or
corvée labour, on pain of punishment. The modern territorial state, by
12
Elias, Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation, vol. II, p. 435.
13
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘A lasting peace through the Federation of Europe (1756)’,
in A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and the State of War (London
1917), p. 95.
contrast, functions as a permanent and potentially total instrument

of exploitation with concentrated armed force at its centre. It oper-
ates in this way because at an earlier point in its history it managed
to disarm autonomous feudal lords, communal militias, mercenaries,
pirates and duelling aristocrats. The modern state is therefore poten-
tially more terrible in its effects than pre-modern political systems.
Its monopoly of the means of violence, as Hobbes remarked, places
its subjects permanently under a cloud of terrible violence.
The historical record shows that Elias is right to observe that
state violence can and does destroy civility, leaving in its wake social
relations riddled with incivility: cruelty, insecurity, aggravated con-
flict, old scores to be settled tomorrow, or the day after.14 The period
after 1500 saw a dramatic growth in the size of armies. There were, not
surprisingly, many recorded cases of expansionist centralised states
undercutting the ability of actors to organise themselves into non-
violent, intermediary associations. From the time of the first assaults
by guastatori (‘devastators’) upon the crops, vines and olive groves of
communities during the Italian Renaissance through to the random
attacks upon peasants by marauding soldiers during the Thirty Years
War and the attempted annihilation of religious groupings like the
Huguenots by the French monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, state-builders often gutted their societies and robbed their
populations of the capacity for peaceful self-organisation. The whole
bloody business is famously summarised in Jacques Callot’s Miseries
and Misfortunes of War (1633): a series of eighteen engravings that
illustrate the brutalities of battle, the looting and atrocities by sol-
diers, the banditry and brigandage of the free booters who followed
in the footsteps of armies, and the cruel punishments meted out to
offenders.
Elias himself illustrates this state production of barbarism in a
chilling account of the Freikorps’ revenges in the Baltic area after the
14
Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organized crime’, in Catherine Beste-
man, Violence. A Reader (Houndsmills and New York 2002), pp. 35–60.
1919 Treaty of Versailles. Pressured by the peace treaty, the Berlin gov-
ernment ordered the withdrawal of German troops out of the Baltic
region. Many resentful Freikorps refused. They stayed and carried on
fighting, not against the Red Army, which had already retreated, but
against reorganised Estonian and Latvian troops backed by British war-
ships. The barbarism that ensued is illustrated by Elias by means of a
citation from the diary of a Freikorps officer:
We fired into surprised crowds, and raged and shot and struck and
hunted. We drove the Latvians across the fields like rabbits and set
fire to every house and blasted every bridge to dust and cut every
telegraph pole. We threw the corpses into the wells and threw in
hand grenades. We killed whoever we captured, we burned
whatever would burn. We saw red, we no longer had any human
feelings in our hearts. Wherever we had camped, the ground
groaned under our destruction. Where we had stormed, where
formerly houses had stood, there now lay rubble, ashes, and
glimmering beams, like abscesses in the bare fields. A huge trail
of smoke marked our paths. We had ignited a huge pile of wood,
which burned more than dead matter. On it burned our hopes, our
desires, the bourgeois tablets, the laws and values of the civilised
world, everything that we had dragged along with us as
moth-eaten rubbish, the values and faith in the things and ideas
of the time that had abandoned us. We pulled back, boasting,
exhilarated, loaded with booty.15
Such details of the slide into barbarism are frightening. They

were the prelude to something that had never happened before – the
chillingly more efficient, well-organised extermination of millions in
the name of ‘race hygiene’. They anticipated thousands of recorded
twentieth-century instances where the wielders of state violence
15
Norbert Elias, ‘Violence and civilisation. The state monopoly of physical violence
and its infringement’, in John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State. New European
Perspectives (London and New York 1988), pp. 196–7 (my translation).
devoured not only democracy, but all remnants of civility, along with
their subjects. What began as illegal punitive expeditions into a civil
society perceived as diseased and in need of amputation ended up (in
the case of totalitarianism) as ‘medicalised killing’: mass murder in
the form of state-organised sterilisation and euthanasia programmes
and the use of ovens and gas chambers, lethal injections and concen-
tration camps, all for the purpose of ridding the polity of so-called
‘human ballast’ (Ballastexistenzen).16 Future moralists, political his-
torians and philosophers will no doubt debate whether organised state
murder was worse than random terrorist killings on a global scale.
Whatever they decide, hopefully they will not let posterity forget the
most bizarre cases of extreme violence by (would-be) officials of the
modern state: the systematic rape of women by soldiers, often with
terrified local men forced at gunpoint to look on; the ritual mutilation
of victims, such as cutting off their noses, breasts, ears or penises; and
the practice of forcing members of a family group at knife- or gunpoint
to kill each other (slowly) in turn, or even to force parents to maim or
kill or hack their children to pieces, and to cook and eat the prepared
dish prior to their own execution.17
These cases of violence are profoundly antithetical to civil
society and democracy. They are grotesque reversals of Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s dictum that ‘primitive’ cultures are anthropophagic (they
‘devour’ their adversaries) while modern civilisations are anthropo-
emic (they segregate, evict, marginalise or ‘vomit’ their adversaries).
Yet – this is their most disturbing feature – these cases do not represent
a lapse into ‘traditionalism’ or ‘tribalism’. It is a big mistake to sup-
pose that such grotesque violence is somehow ‘beneath’ and ‘below’
otherwise modern and civilised and democratic standards. The fact is
16
Robert Jay Lifton, ‘Medicalised killing in Auschwitz’, Psychoanalytic Reflections
on the Holocaust: Selected Essays, ed. S. A. Luel and P. Marcus (New York 1984),
especially pp. 14–19.
17
All of these practices are documented in K. B. Wilson, ‘Cults of violence and counter
violence in Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 3 (September
1992), pp. 527–82.
that they are quintessentially modern, and not only because of their
implication in the struggle for territorially bound state power. They
are illustrations of the thoroughly modern, rational-calculating use
of violence as a technique of terrorising and demoralising whole pop-
ulations, of preventing them from engaging in organised or thought-
out resistance. An extreme version of this cunning use of exemplary
violence to cow and control the state’s subjects is symbolised by the
Central African Republic regime operated by Jean-Bedel Bokassa, him-
self renowned for doing by day what civilised human beings fear by
night: ordering on one occasion the murder of fellow ministers, politi-
cians, officials and army officers; personally murdering several dozen
children who were disappeared after protesting against school uni-
forms; and using the structures of armed state power to practise can-
nibalistic rites, in the process (according to the rumours) filling his
Kologa Palace fridges with human corpses stuffed with rice in prepa-
ration for eating.18
barbarism
It is tempting, in the face of such cruelty, to draw the pessimistic con-
clusion that democratic institutions and civil societies have about as
much chance of long-term survival as a snow-flake in hell. Surely they
cannot escape either today’s triangle of violence or the violent grip of
the armed sovereign state, within whose shadows each newborn child
is today expected to do within a few years what is virtually impossi-
ble: to acquire a civilised sense of shame and self-control which it
took European populations many centuries to develop, and then only
imperfectly?
Zygmunt Bauman’s sophisticated Modernity and the Holo-
caust (1993) reinforces this pessimistic line of questioning.19 Previous
18
See Brian Titley, Dark Age. The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa (Quebec City
1997).
19
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford 1993), especially
pp. 12–18, 27–30, 107–11.
accounts of the modern European civilising process, Elias included,

are charged with ignoring its perversely self-destructive dynamics.
The modern civilising process, typically understood as the slow but
steady inculcation of shared norms such as the abhorrence of murder,
the disinclination to violent assault, moral responsibility for one’s
actions in the world and the fear of a guilty conscience, not only
results (Bauman agrees with Elias) in dangerous concentrations of vio-
lent means in state hands. It is also a process of divesting the patterns
of ownership and deployment of violent means from moral calculus.
Hence, it carries within it the seeds of calculated cruelty on a mass
scale. The civilising process logically leads to the kind of amoral atti-
tude displayed by Dr Servatius in his summary defence of Adolf Eich-
mann in Jerusalem: figures like Eichmann, Servatius remarked, are
decorated for acts if they triumph over their enemies, whereas they
go to the gallows in disgrace if they are defeated.
Bauman argues that zones of civility in everyday life are possi-
ble only because somewhere in the wings physical violence is stored
up, set aside for rainy days – in institutional places and in quantities
that effectively place it beyond the control of ordinary citizens. Every-
day codes of conduct thus mellow in a cage of powerlessness. Civility
is possible only because the subjects of state power are constantly
threatened with violence in case they are violent – with violence they
themselves cannot match or reasonably expect to repulse. The paci-
fication of everyday life renders most people defenceless; they poten-
tially become the playthings of sinister managers of coercion, whose
own barbarism is a form of quest for civilisation. When the Nazis
tested gas chambers on disabled Germans, this was not atavism, or an
aberration from normality, or a surfacing of innate aggressive drives
and instincts. Under modern conditions, the urge to exterminate oth-
ers functions as a form of civilising violence. It is a way forward, a
more modern method of improving the health and purity of the polit-
ical and social order.
In effect, Bauman’s thesis is the mirror image of the late-
eighteenth-century view of the civilising process as an upward spiral
into civility. Civilisation, far from ‘lapsing’ into barbarism, progresses

by tumbling headlong towards it. Civility and barbarity are not
contradictory opposites. They lie side by side on a down-spiralling
continuum of violence. When Elias himself describes the murder of
the Jews as ‘a throwback to the barbarism and savagery of earlier ages’,
or as ‘one of the deepest’20 modern regressions to barbarism, his words
are misleading. According to Bauman, civility and barbarism are neg-
ative dialectical twins. There is no dividing line between civilised
norms and uncivil abnormality. The quest to ‘civilise’ others is at
the heart of fascist barbarism. And so the word civilisation should
be a synonym for the constant potential, under modern conditions,
of political power perfecting itself into the bureaucratic planning and
execution of genocide. ‘Holocaust-style phenomena must be recog-
nized as legitimate outcomes of [the] civilising tendency, and its con-
stant potential.’
Seen from the standpoint of democratic politics, Bauman is
surely right to insist that totalitarianism is no mere accident on the
superhighway of modern progress. His thesis also helpfully points
to one of the most disturbing enigmas that political thinking about
democracy and violence must face: that there are indeed times and
places when civilised manners can and do peacefully cohabit with
mass murder. Twentieth-century totalitarianism was full of exam-
ples. Stalin was a doting father to his little daughter ‘Setanka’. His
close ally, Nikolai Yezhov, the dwarflike alcoholic who managed (and
liked to lend a personal hand to) the NKVD’s terror during the mid-
1930s, also enjoyed a reputation as a tender daddy who spoiled his
daughter with presents and games. At the Great Gatsby-style party in
late April 1935 in Moscow, hosted by the first American Ambassador
to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, the entire Soviet elite, bar
Stalin himself, reportedly socialised with smiling faces and cigarettes
and drinks in hand, knowing that the guests included both henchmen
20
Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge 1996), pp. 302, 308.
and victims, many of whom were both. Fascism also specialised in

these fine arts of melding civility and barbarity. The atmosphere
was reportedly friendly and relaxed at Wannsee, where in January
1942 Müller, Heydrich, Eichmann and their Nazi colleagues sipped
champagne and smoked cigars after a hard day’s work of detailing
how to organize the Endlösung. In Paris, the French Gestapo liked
to throw lavish parties for collaborationists and German officials.
The suave gatherings often culminated in drunken visits to basement
cells, where prisoners would be tortured before the guests’ blood-shot
eyes. The hand of civilised barbarism outlived the military defeat
of Nazism. Those attending the civilised trials of war criminals at
Nuremberg were shocked to find a city whose ruins were literally
carpeted with tens of thousands of corpses, whose rotting flesh made
local water dangerously undrinkable – exactly because it was water
trickling from a morgue created by Allied bombers.
The key point made by Bauman, that civility is prone to bar-
barism, is salutary. Yet his conclusion that modern civility is merely
the ally of barbarity has its costs, one of which is his dogmatic exis-
tentialism. The postulates of ‘mutual assistance, solidarity, reciprocal
respect etc.’, qualities to which Bauman pays lip service (since they
are antithetical to totalitarianism) and which are normally considered
among the organising principles of any functioning civil society, are
brushed aside conceptually as mere phantoms. Civil society, a demo-
cratic category that Bauman needs in order to get beyond modernity by
overcoming its de-civilising potential, is defined out of existence. The
consequence, formally speaking, is that Bauman’s account assumes
a strange resemblance to the Marxian reduction of civil society to
bourgeois domination and violence. Not surprisingly, Bauman’s con-
clusions slip into political pessimism. Civil society and democracy
become just two old-fashioned – modern – words. All that is left is the
vain struggle by individuals against barbarism – a forlorn quest for a
vaguely defined authenticity.21
21
See my remarks on Bauman’s critique of ethics in Global Civil Society?, pp. 199–200.
overkill
The proposition that modern civility equals barbarity has another
weakness. It obscures the point that the modern civilising process
contains several potentially productive – if highly dangerous – con-
tradictions. The most obvious is the frightening development of tech-
niques of total war and universal violence that threaten overkill: the
capacity to overwhelm all political institutions and to reduce to zero
their power of securing their subjects’ lives against the ravages of vio-
lence. The problem of overkill needs to be built in to democratic think-
ing and politics, and not just because it is a fishbone in the throat of
irresponsible political power. The process of overkill is an ultimate
problem because it has the potential to eliminate politics by killing
many millions of the earth’s species, perhaps even to exterminate
homo sapiens itself.
All weapons of violence tend towards overkill, of course. From
the beginning, the weapons invented and used by humans – the rock,
spear, javelin, dart, arrow – bestowed a form of power to produce
effects out of all proportion to the means employed. That power trans-
formed hominids into humans by enabling them to become the first
sizeable creatures on earth to effect change by committing acts of vio-
lence at a distance – and so surviving and exploiting even the largest
land animals. Humans became what they threw. The arts of manipu-
lating fire and the later means of killing at a distance – the crossbow,
the trebuchet, Greek fire – greatly added to the stock of human pow-
ers to be violent. The invention of gunpowder, by the Chinese, at
the end of the first millennium BCE, proved to be especially impor-
tant. It facilitated the rise of the so-called gunpowder empires, such
as those of the Ottomans, Russians and Mughals.22 European powers
embraced gunpowder as if it were a new love; they wielded its charms
and cruelties against various enemies, especially in the New World,
22
An excellent short survey of the history of weaponry is to be found in Alfred W.
Crosby, Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History (Cambridge and New
York 2002).
where (as Montaigne put it) ‘the lightning flashes of our cannons, the
thundering of our harquebuses’23 had both propaganda purposes and
killing effects.
The harnessing of gunpowder for more destructive ends – for
the development of weapons with a potentially global reach – brought
human beings into contact, for the first time, with the possibility
of total war. Mechanised total war is an invention of the late eigh-
teenth century, but it only reached perfection – and the height of self-
contradiction – during the long twentieth century of violence that
is now behind us. In the era of triangular violence, it is most defi-
nitely still with us. Born on the high seas in all-devouring confronta-
tions, in which the aim is skilfully to destroy one’s opponents and
their equipment completely, total war, according to Admiral Friedrich
Ruge, aimed ‘at destroying the honour, the identity, the very soul of
the enemy’. During the 1930s, Lieutenant-General von Metsch agreed:
‘In total war, everything is a front!’24
It evidently never occurred to von Metsch to consider whether
war, or at least certain types of war, would still be possible in a world
flooded with weapons with a universal reach. Here is the question
that escaped him: are there weapons which, if used by their respec-
tive combatants, would necessarily catapult us, say, from the early
nineteenth-century world of Colonel Shrapnel testing his deadly new
fragmenting shell on the wildlife of Foulness Island, into a world in
which weapons of war potentially render (certain forms of) war obso-
lete, simply because human beings could no longer survive their dev-
astating effects?
The history of the development of modern weapons systems was
from the outset pregnant with this possibility that violence so begets
violence that it threatens the utility of violence. Michael Howard’s
23
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (London 1987), p. 1030.
24
Cited in Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics. An Essay on Dromology (New York 1986),
p. 75. See also Jan Patočka’s classic essay, ‘Wars of the twentieth century and the
twentieth century as war’, in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Chicago
and La Salle 1996), pp. 119–37.
study of the growth of weapons of violence in Europe pinpoints a

number of episodes in which the invention of a new weapon paralysed
the ability of the combatants to fight a war effectively.25 One exam-
ple: in 1346, in the battle at Crécy, Edward III introduced longbow
archers against enemy cavalry. These longbows, which shot five or
six arrows in the same period of time that an old-fashioned crossbow
took to shoot just one of its darts, devastated opponents; according
to reliable estimates, more than 1,500 of them were killed for about
100 English casualties. Thereupon, cavalry commanders everywhere
become convinced that their ‘men-at-arms’ must don heavier plate
armour. The net effect of that move (as the French discovered to their
cost at Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt in 1415) was to render cavalry-
men on both sides useless when dismounted, and incapable of speedy
or clear-sighted manoeuvres when mounted.
The same self-contradictory logic of obsolescence within
‘modern’ weapons, whose propensity to devastate and to kill grows
exponentially, precisely because that is their purpose, first became
publicly evident in the early years of the twentieth century. Long
before Hitler’s rise to power, for instance, the Reichswehr command
had formulated a strategy for taking advantage of the latest weapons of
war by drawing up detailed plans for the defence of Germany against
a possible French invasion.26 It recommended that in such circum-
stances Germany and the Germans would have to be treated like a
subject African colony. Every bridge, road and telephone line would
have to be destroyed; mustard gas bombs would need to be dropped on
German citizens to hinder the French advance; and it would be neces-
sary to wage semi-permanent guerrilla operations without regard for
the distinction between civilians and armies.
The bizarre logic of total war evident in the German generals’
insistence that Germany might have to be destroyed in order to save
25
Michael Howard, War in European History (London, Oxford and New York 1976),
pp. 11–12.
26
See W. Deist (ed.), The German Military in the Age of Total War (Leamington Spa
1985), p. 123.
it may be said to have reached its apogee – we return to Orwell – with

the invention and deployment of nuclear weaponry, the destructive
potential of which is symbolised by the dripping flesh, swollen faces
and molten and confused bodies left behind on the scorched earth
of Hiroshima by the bomber plane Enola Gay, following its swoop
over the city one summer’s morning early in August 1945. Since that
day, the principle of annihilation, which recognizes no ‘class princi-
ple’ (Khrushchev), has bedevilled the whole world. The human species
has had to contend not only with its own individual mortality but
with the possibility of the collective death of humanity. In the era
of triangular violence, the number of nuclear-tipped states continues
to grow, and there is no end to talk of the ‘benefits’ and ‘necessary
evil’ of nuclear weaponry – despite growing evidence (of the kind
produced by the British testing of nuclear weapons in Australia27 )
that their development and use has hideous ecological and human
effects.
Nervous arguments for and against nuclear weapons are some-
times combined in assessments of the post-Cold War world, for
instance in the rather confused proposals for ‘minimal nuclear plu-
ralism’ developed by Singer and Wildavsky.28 They yearn for a tripo-
lar world in which, ideally, the United States, China and a combined
European Nuclear Force (comprising the weaponry of Britain, France
and the former Soviet Republics) together exercise strict oligopolis-
tic control over the development and deployment of nuclear arse-
nals for the ultimate purposes of expanding the democratic zone of
peace and creating a safer ‘non-nuclear world’. Nuclear weapons are
not especially dangerous, and they are for the time being a necessity,
they say. The ‘natural’ condition of nuclear weapons is to be unused.
Besides, there are clearly definable defensive benefits accruing to
27
See my ‘Maralinga’s afterlife’, The Sunday Age, Melbourne, 11 May 2003, pp. 1–3.
28
Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order. Zones of Peace/Zones of
Turmoil (Chatham, NJ 1993), pp. 60–76.
nuclear-tipped states, since their potential non-nuclear enemies are

forced to think twice about the probable consequences of military
engagement. The cost to the big powers of developing effective shields
against would-be nuclear competitors is not especially prohibitive,
and in any case, they add, the negative consequences of using nuclear
weapons in battle have been exaggerated by their critics. ‘While fallout
would cause many deaths outside the zone of combat if large numbers
of weapons were exploded near the ground’, they claim, ‘the numbers
would not be large compared to the number of people otherwise dying
of diseases and accidents and would not substantially change people’s
life expectancy in any country not in the war itself.’
Given these bold considerations, it is surprising that Singer and
Wildavsky ultimately remain unconvinced of their own confident
claims. Their confusion in fact expresses the nuclear overkill problem
they want otherwise to wish away. They admit that even though the
maintenance of nuclear forces is expensive, cost considerations and
arms-control agreements are proving incapable of preventing states
of all description from acquiring the technical capability of building
nuclear weapons. Besides, the two basic forms of missile defence sys-
tems, the space-based brilliant pebbles method of filling the heavens
with orbiting satellites trained to collide with airborne ballistic mis-
siles, or the ‘brilliant eyes’ method of using ground-based interceptors,
have their technical limitations. Such systems also remain vulnerable
to the clandestine delivery of weapons of mass destruction (‘suitcase
bombs’) by means of ships, or as airfreight. Moreover – the honest
reasoning of Singer and Wildavsky becomes powerful from here on –
the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more probable it is
that some nuclear weapons will be used by ‘desperate, irresponsible,
or crazy’ governments, or escape from governmental control and fall
into the hands of groups that might either have an accident with them
or actually use them. Then there is the ultimate risky fact about the
bomb: ‘Nuclear weapons have the possibility of getting out of con-
trol. Countries can produce thousands of them. They can be made
very large. Through unimaginable circumstances, there can be wars

in which many thousands of them are used and hundreds of millions
of people are killed. Even though this is extremely unlikely, the pos-
sibility is inherent in the nature of nuclear weapons.’
damocles and democracy

Singer and Wildavsky’s reasoning clearly illustrates the self-
contradiction within the ‘realist’ logic governing the interaction of
heavily armed territorial states hell-bent on constantly ‘modernising’
their armaments. This self-contradictory capacity for overkill within
modern weapons systems strikes down von Clausewitz’s dictum that
victory in modern warfare goes to the side that can will itself to survive
and to persuade its adversary to surrender. That dictum falls foul of the
problem of overkill, which in turn – in accordance with the paradox of
Damocles29 – encourages experiments with various counter-strategies
that aim to regulate and resist state-produced violence.
The paradox of Damocles teaches political thinkers to ponder
the powerlessness that sometimes results from the (threatened) use of
violence. According to the well-known story, in the court of Diony-
sius, the terrible tyrant ruler of Syracuse during the fourth century
BCE, there was a sycophantic courtier named Damocles. Even though
Dionysius heaped cruelty onto all his subjects, who hated him in
return, Damocles praised the ruler’s greatness. He agreed with all his
opinions, and laughed at everything the despot found funny. Damo-
cles had only one regret; he wished to become a ruler just like the
violent Dionysius. The tyrant was no fool, and easily spotting the
crude flattery of his simpleton subject, he decided to teach Damocles
a lesson by commanding him to dress in royal garments and a gold
crown, and to preside as ruler at a magnificent banquet held in his hon-
our. Damocles was overjoyed. But his mood swung suddenly when he
29
John Keane, ‘Fear and Democracy’, in Kenton Worcester et al. (eds.), Violence and
Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (New York and London), pp. 226–43.
discovered, hanging by a single hair immediately above his throne, a

huge sharpened sword aimed directly at the centre of his skull. Damo-
cles cried out in horror. He begged to be seated with the rest of the
guests, but Dionysius at first refused. Before hurrying off the throne,
greatly relieved, his foolish courtier had to be taught a fundamental
lesson about violence: since those who rule by the sword potentially
die by the sword, those who govern, or have designs on government,
are sometimes best advised to seek means other than violence through
which to command the allegiance of their subjects.
The story of the flight of Damocles from the hot seat of vio-
lence reminds us that the history of modern state-building is more
paradoxical and self-contradictory than scholars such as Elias and
Bauman have supposed. It provides one clue as to why the devel-
opment of an international system of empires and territorial states
struggling to monopolise the means of violence has everywhere been
a history of more or less sustained resistance, organised from above
and below, to the potentially destructive effects of the violence inher-
ent in this system. Hobbesian ‘realism’ should not be allowed to have
the last word on the subject of state violence: the mosaic of overlap-
ping and often contradictory tendencies that we loosely call moder-
nity includes imaginative attempts to invent and to deploy new non-
violent methods of publicly checking and regulating the institutions
of violence. These prophylactics, outlined in the following pages, are
examples of what this essay has already called the democratisation
of violence: they are techniques for ensuring that the institutions of
violence – police forces, armies, secret intelligence bodies – neither
engage in overkill nor become permanently ‘owned’ by any particular
power group, including the government of the day. This modern strug-
gle to demonstrate that the institutions of violence are contingent by
turning them into disembodied or ‘empty’ spaces of power that can be
restrained or made to change course or be reshaped by others, citizens
included, can be understood as an attempt to resolve the paradox of
Damocles. The effort to minimise or eradicate the threats of violence
confronting civil society from the outside has deep and multiple his-
torical roots. They cannot be traced here, but worth examining in
more detail are three types of pacification strategy, each of which is
vital to democracy and its future.
philadelphia
One such pacification strategy is represented by the various consti-
tutional experiments that aim to counter the so-called Westphalian
model of inter-state power. According to this model, whole regions
and ultimately the globe itself must perforce be divided territorially
among sovereign states enjoying a monopoly of the means of violence.
Each state is left free to enter into irenic agreements with others, or to
make war on those states it declares to be an enemy. For a succession of
relatively neglected political analysts, stretching from Pufendorf and
Althusius through to Paine, Calhoun, von Seydel and Jean Monnet,
this model of inter-state power has never deserved to be hegemonic.
Some of them have pointed to constitutional alternatives, including
the old Swiss Confederation that survived from the later medieval
period until 1789, the United Provinces of the Netherlands that lasted
from 1579 to 1795, and the German Bund between the years 1815 and
1866. Each of these regimes, it is worth noting, was guided by the
broad aim of developing a type of supra-state government founded
upon a foedus or treaty among states, whose rulers and ruled would
see a distinct advantage: the practical transcendence of a system of
sovereign states prone constantly to war and rumours of war.
The Philadelphian model, born of the American colonists’ strug-
gle against the British and implemented as the United States of Amer-
ica between the establishment of the Union (1781–89) and the Civil
War (1861–65), is an example of this alternative trend. It is impor-
tant to the subject of democracy and violence, and not only because
the United States is now the most powerful democracy on earth. The
whole point of the Philadelphia experiment was to constitutionalise
the means of violence in such a way that the unaccountable qual-
ity of state violence and the bellicose anarchy among states typical
of the Westphalian model are overcome.30 The core structures of the

Philadelphian model, described by James Madison as a ‘compound
republic’, combined forms of popular (male) sovereignty exercised as
citizens’ rights within civil society, including the right to a free press
and (twisting Hobbes’s maxim that covenants without the sword are
nothing) the right to bear arms, codified in the Second Amendment:
‘A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.’31 The principles of the Philadelphian model also included
the formal equality of the member states of the union, as well as a
balance and division of power within the two-tiered system of state
institutions, including its policing procedures and war-making pow-
ers (symbolised, for instance, by the subdivision of powers of war-
making, military command and foreign affairs between the President
and a two-chamber Congress divided along federal lines). To reinforce
this architecture of checked-and-balanced armed power, the model
also provided for citizens’ militia as a means of restraining the cen-
tral government from waging unpopular foreign wars. In each of these
innovations, the Philadelphia model was driven by an overall desire
to avoid the emergence of another Europe, the essence of whose sys-
tems of government was seen to be political hierarchy, self-destructive
power politics and constant wars among states.
Some features of this Philadelphia experiment, especially
the will to overcome the old Westphalian model through the
30
See Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government
(Stanford, CA 1970); Daniel H. Deudney, ‘The Philadelphian system: sovereignty,
arms control, and balance of power in the American states-union, circa 1787–1861’,
International Organization, 49, 2 (Spring 1995), pp. 191–228; and my account of
Thomas Paine’s advocacy of federalism in the new American republic in Tom Paine:
A Political Life (New York and London 1995), ch. 7.
31
Among the best recent discussions of the origins of the Americans’ right to retain
violent weapons are Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: the Origins of
an Anglo-American Right (Cambridge, MA 1994); Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every
Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque 1984); and, on
the republican genealogy of the right to bear arms, Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘No Standing
Armies!’ The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore 1974).
constitutional apportioning of power over the means of violence, have

found their way into such twentieth-century constitutional experi-
ments as the League of Nations the United Nations and the still-
unfinished project of the European Union. They have developed in
tandem with efforts to criminalise certain forms of state violence.32
The International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo and,
most recently, the tribunals for ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra
Leone, are examples of path-breaking efforts to democratise state vio-
lence: to define and to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity,
and genocide. In each case, the firm presumption is against the rule,
outlined in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, that the
strong are entitled to do whatever they have the power to do, while
the weak must accept what they have to accept. These constitutional
experiments suppose that armed territorial states and their men of
power are capable of becoming cold-blooded monsters.
It is true that these constitutional efforts to apply due process
of law have suffered numerous flaws and bitter controversies.33 They
have been accused of being ‘kangaroo courts’ or ‘lynching parties’ or
even ‘show trials’ dispensing ‘victors’ justice’ retroactively (‘The vic-
tor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused’, com-
plained Göring34 ). They have been accused of the opposite weakness:
that they extend the rule of law to defendants who are unworthy of
such respect, or the time and money and tedium involved. That is
a fair point: they do indeed reject the old view that bastards should
be court-martialled and shot next morning, or castrated (the view of
both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill) or flung into concen-
tration camps. The tribunals have as well been ensnared in disputes
about how to define unambiguously war crimes (such as rape and
genocide) and their appropriate means of punishment. Some observers
32
Further details of the development of a global political/legal system of ‘cosmocracy’
are found in my Global Civil Society?
33
Gary T. Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance. The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals
(Princeton and Oxford 2000).
34
G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York 1947), p. 4.
have even complained (understandably) that tribunals cannot address

the fact that violent crimes against humanity are worse than that: that
they resemble ‘a sin against the Spirit’.35 And, until recently, tribunals
have been hampered by the fact that they have operated against the
backdrop of the ongoing failure of ‘the international community’ to
establish a permanent international criminal court, where trials that
would otherwise be impossible for political reasons elsewhere can in
fact be held.
Notwithstanding these various weaknesses and disputes, the
tribunals that date from the botched trials of German war criminals
and Young Turk perpetrators of Armenian genocide in the early twen-
tieth century are beginning to have effect. They have begun to unpick
the key assumption of Westphalian jurisprudence, that international
law ought to reflect the will of sovereign territorial states, whose self-
centred nature compels them to defend and to respect their interna-
tional commitments only in so far as their territorial power and ‘vital
interests’ (Henry Kissinger) are honoured. The war crimes tribunals
of the past hundred years have directly challenged this precept: they
revive and amend and radicalise the old Christian doctrine of ‘just
war’, with its imperatives of discrimination and proportionality, and
its converse principle, ‘just cause’, according to which violence may be
used to punish the guilty party in war in the name of a universal duty
of solidarity with the Christian or human communities. In assum-
ing responsibility for dispensing punishment where punishment is
due, these tribunals recognise the perils of taking an eye for an eye.
Out of respect for the victims, and in the name of civility, they reject
the old maxim that justice should be done even if the world perishes
(fiat justitia et pereat mundus). They expound the inverse maxim: that
35
Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York 1997), p. 355.
See also Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after
Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston 1998) and the remarks of Hannah Arendt to
Karl Jaspers (17 August 1946), in their Correspondence, 1926–1969 (New York 1992),
p. 54: ‘It may be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate. That is,
this guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, oversteps and shatters any and all legal
systems. That is the reason why the Nazis in Nuremberg are so smug.’
justice should be done lest the world should perish (fiat justitia ne
pereat mundus).36
Torture
The twentieth-century rethinking of the Westphalian model has con-
centrated not only on constitutionalising and reducing the quantity
and types of violence within the world of inter-state relations. Driven
by the democratic maxim that states are bellicose the more that they
exercise power violently over their subjects at home, international
constitutional efforts have also concentrated on the domestic ‘pacifi-
cation’ of states. The Council of Europe, founded in 1949 with three
key objectives – pluralist democracy, commitment to the rule of law
and the protection of human rights – is something of a prototype of
this strategy, since for the first time anywhere in the world it sought,
in the following year, to codify these objectives in the European Con-
vention of Human Rights, and to provide mechanisms for enforcing
them effectively.
Observance of these objectives is considered the key condi-
tion of a state’s membership of the Council of Europe. Unlike most
supranational organisations, admission to it is not automatic. Appli-
cant states must first accept both its Statute (which embodies the
three objectives) and scrutiny of their laws and practices to establish
whether in fact the objectives are being fulfilled. Yet the Council’s
role in defending individuals’ rights, regardless of their formal citizen-
ship status, goes well beyond scrutinising individual states’ laws and
practices at the time of entry. Membership also entails a continuous
obligation to observe these rights, which the Council seeks to ensure
by means of specific enforcement procedures, including the prospect
of a member state, after the exhaustion of domestic remedies, being
taken to the quasi-judicial European Commission and the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. Among the unusual features
of the enforcement process is that violations of human rights, such
36
See the 1994 Report to the United Nations of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia in ICTY Yearbook 1994 (New York 1994), p. 87.
as freedom from torture, are deemed to extend to potential or actual

incidents outside a state’s territory (as in cases of deportation or extra-
dition of an individual to a country where he or she is at risk of state
violence).
The Council’s enforcement process additionally tries to address
the fact that even when a state is deemed to have violated a basic
human right, its policing and justice system may carry on as before,
displaying its old bad ways. The Council does so through such mech-
anisms as the Torture Committee, which has the specific mandate
of examining, by means of inspection visits, the treatment of indi-
viduals deprived of their rights with a view, where necessary, to pro-
tecting them from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
The Committee works on the democratic assumption that state vio-
lence against its subjects flourishes when hidden from the public eye.
Its overall strategy is therefore describable as the de-concealment or
democratisation of violence. Although the Committee must give prior
notification of a visit to a particular country, that state is obliged to
permit its visits unannounced to any place within the state’s juris-
diction, including prisons, military barracks, asylum centres, hospi-
tals for the mentally ill and children’s homes. The Committee tries
to counter the state’s propensity to hide its violence through the ele-
ment of surprise, which is reflected in the limited time-scales (usually
two weeks) of its announced but unscheduled visits. It further relies
on the tactics of interviewing allegedly violated individuals in pri-
vate and requesting from local civil society groups additional relevant
information. After each visit, the Committee is required to produce a
report, whose publication depends either upon the request of the state
party – which is becoming the norm – or upon the unilateral decision
of the Committee to embarrass that state by making the report pub-
licly available.
civility politics
Efforts to democratise the means of governmental violence are not
exclusively concentrated within the spheres of government. They
also arise from below, from within the overlapping civil societies
that make up the global civil society that is emerging. These non-
governmental public initiatives aim to problematise the arbitrary use
of violence – and to place stricter limits upon its use by armed gov-
ernmental institutions.
Whether these initiatives succeed, or to what degree they suc-
ceed, is not at issue here. The important point is that since the birth
of the anti-slavery movement at the end of the eighteenth century – a
movement that fed publicly upon the deep tensions within the pre-
vailing language of ‘natural law’ that was used to justify slavery37 –
the world has begun to witness the growth, for the first time on any
scale, of what might be called a civility politics, that is, organized cit-
izens’ initiatives that seek to ensure that nobody ‘owns’ or arbitrarily
uses the means of state violence against civil societies at home and/or
abroad. Those (like Elias and Bauman) who ignore this new politics of
civility are usually attached, sometimes without recognising it, to an
image of the modern territorial state first sketched by Hobbes. That
image was revived last century in Carl Schmitt’s fascist interpretation
of the modern state as ‘the mortal God’, as the first artificial product
of the modern technological world, as a humanly invented mecha-
nism of command that leads the struggle, if necessary by means of
violence, against all domestic and foreign competitor powers, actual
or potential.38
This view of the state as a mortal God is becoming unrealis-
tic. Recent citizens’ efforts to publicise and to denounce the use of
rape as a weapon of war, to call for the abolition of landmines and
for squeezes upon the arms trade, to argue the illegality of nuclear
weapons in such bodies as the International Court of Justice, even
to block the detonation of these weapons by direct action, serve as
a reminder that ‘peace’ is now of concern not only to statesmen,
37
Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused. Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven
and London 1975).
38
Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes (Hamburg
1938).
generals and diplomats, it is also the preoccupation of citizen-civilians

as well.
Exemplary of this trend is the growth of peace movements,
which have their spiritual and organisational roots in two older cur-
rents of the modern pacifist tradition: ‘separational’ pacifism, whose
proponents, though accepting the magistrate’s sword as a necessary
evil in the world, rejected participation in civil government by their
own members; and the ‘integrational’ pacifism evident in the civil
initiatives of groups like the Quakers, who rejected not government
but its use of injurious force.39 The onset of total war, and the advent
of nuclear and biochemical weapons during the last century, have
arguably hot-housed the growth of peace initiatives, a vocal example
of which was the swelling peace movement in Britain during the first
half of the 1980s.40 Judged by its number of activists, supporters and
sympathisers, that movement was more popular than its predecessors
in the 1950s and 1960s – the early Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
and anti-Vietnam War protests – and it arguably represented, for its
time, the largest single social movement of modern European history.
The movement was marked by two striking characteristics; they
should be noted, if only because any public effort to counter the trian-
gle of violence will probably have to come to terms with their legacy.
First, the peace movement managed to bring the subject of nuclear
weapons out from under a shroud of official secrecy and scientific-
technical expertise into the field of active public discussion, much of
it based at the level of the small group. In opposition to the bellicose
nationalism and nuclear weapons policy of the Thatcher government,
this peace movement invented autonomous public spheres of debate,
action and disobedience. In respect of its anti-statism, it can be seen
in retrospect to have constituted an important contribution to the
39
Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (London 1972) and Martin Ceadel, The Ori-
gins of War Prevention. The British Peace Movement and International Relations
1730–1854 (Oxford 1996).
40
The following is a brief summary of John Keane, ‘Civil society and the peace move-
ment in Britain’, Thesis Eleven, 8 (1984), pp. 5–22.
unending, long-term struggle for renewing and enriching old British

traditions: parliamentary democracy, independent public criticism
and suspicion of overextended power. The movement was marked,
second, by a great diversity of goals and methods. Its remarkable plu-
ralism was expressed in its highly decentralised and diverse patterns of
social support; in its thousands of campaign groups, service-oriented
organizations and lateral groups drawing upon particular constituen-
cies; and in its reliance upon a bewildering variety of concrete objec-
tives and actions, which ranged from street-petitioning, pressuring
local parliamentary representatives, organising nuclear-free zones, to
such forms of direct action as ‘die-ins’, the refusal to handle and
transport nuclear waste, silent vigils and the civilian encirclement
of nuclear bases.
Given the plurality of its concrete strategies and patterns of
social support, this peace movement, like all contemporary social
movements, cannot easily be analysed and summarised in general
propositions. The movement’s preoccupation with the phased deploy-
ment of cruise missiles on British and continental European soil
was nevertheless a key unifying factor in its civility politics. It was
not by chance that nuclear weapons systems became the most vis-
ible symbols of what were opposed unconditionally. For within the
movement these missiles were widely viewed as the most advanced
expression of a strategic doctrine that developed during the 1950s,
and that later became conventional wisdom among nuclear strate-
gists, research technicians, industrial producers and political elites:
the doctrine of counterforce.
In its various forms, this doctrine asserted that technical preci-
sion and the controlled and limited use of force could be introduced
into the fighting of nuclear battles. It replaced, or at least supple-
mented, the view, of the late 1940s and early 1950s, that the threat of
mutual assured destruction (MAD) would deter enemies and ensure
the reign of universal peace – that safety, as Winston Churchill put
it, was to be the child of terror, survival the twin brother of annihila-
tion. By early 1980, when the numbers of activists and sympathisers
within the peace movement began rapidly to swell, this old doctrine of
MAD had given way to a new and undoubtedly more dangerous official
policy – counterforce – whose newly miniaturised and more precise
arsenals were packaged in the language of ‘Air–Land Battle’, ‘flexible
response’, ‘surgical strikes’ and (in the Soviet version) ‘defence through
war-fighting’. In the course of four decades, in other words, research
and development and strategic deployment of weapons had moved
from H-bombs and ABMs, through multiple warheads and MIRVs
(multiple independently targeted warheads) to ‘first strike’ and ‘flexi-
ble’ weapons such as neutron bombs, SS2Os, and cruise and Pershing
missile systems.
This development of ‘tactical weapons’ was seen by most within
the movement to have lowered the threshold separating nuclear from
conventional arms. The doctrine of counterforce supposed, contrary to
von Clausewitz, that war, even nuclear war, could be free of ‘friction’,
and therefore restricted and winnable. It was this so-called ‘moderni-
sation’ of nuclear weapons policy that the movement sensed to be
perilous. The process of ‘deterrence’ was seen widely to be unstable,
leading to preparations for a type of war that would be qualitatively
different, and certainly worse, than the old European wars of Napoleon
or Frederick II. The claim (defended in the early 1980s by Atlanticists)
that the policy of deterrence had ‘kept the peace since ’45’ was there-
fore rejected as an apology for what E. P. Thompson, the movement’s
most famous publicist, called exterminist tendencies. Détente was
seen as synonymous with the steady increase of more ‘advanced’ and
ever more dangerous and decadent weapons, whose level of sophisti-
cation and hyper-complexity rendered them vulnerable to mechanical
and ‘human’ failures. The famous 1958 warning of Bertrand Russell
that some unforeseen circumstance might spark off a worldwide catas-
trophe was widely felt. The movement saw détente as equivalent to
an incumbent Prime Minister who vowed publicly to press the but-
ton when pushed into a corner. It associated the word détente with
a tottering-on-the-brink pattern of pseudo-negotiation and struggle
for ‘advantage’ and ‘superiority’ between the superpowers, in which
(as the failed Geneva INF and START talks indicated) negotiations
and arms control agreements were at best momentary pauses within
a wider process of arms proliferation and military posturing. Under
pressure from détente, many within the movement believed, exis-
tence was beginning to degenerate into the state of nature described
by Hobbes. There developed a sense that the constant rearmament
associated with the ‘modernisation’ of nuclear (and chemical and bio-
logical) weapons was an endless struggle for power that could only
ever end in death organised on a mass scale.
This was one key reason why civil society networks in Britain
began in this period to rouse themselves. Large sections of the popula-
tion began to lose trust in the official image of ‘deterrence’, which they
criticised and resisted as a codeword for rearmament, as a new ideol-
ogy of state power. Détente, the supposed easing of tensions among
states and citizens, had the effect of producing a generalised anxi-
ety about the visible increase in the scope and power of the nuclear
state and its new and improved weapons – like ground-launched cruise
missiles that must be fired from civilian areas, or Trident submarines
2,500 times more destructive than one Hiroshima bomb. Such pub-
lic anxiety was evident, for instance, in the widespread belief at the
time that nuclear war was probable within the next decade. It was
also apparent in the panicky outrage produced by the government’s
‘civil defence’ circulars, which emphasised the need for the state to
control the sick, starving and dying survivors of a nuclear attack
through commissioners with dictatorial powers, armed police, special
courts and internment camps. The whole process of anxiety produc-
tion was summed up in the mixture of laughter and fear catalysed
by the 1980 Home Office pamphlet Protect and Survive – a pam-
phlet which brought the subject of nuclear war into the heart of civil
society by instructing every household, in ‘humane’ and surgically
precise language, how to survive a nuclear war by taking down its
curtains, stocking up on batteries and mechanical clocks, crouching
under tables and stairways, and tuning in to the BBC, to be told what
to do next.
Through such experiences, various groups and institutions

within the civil society caught a glimpse of themselves as passive
hostages in a wider struggle among nuclear states. Détente began to
have another unintended effect – the perceived destruction of civil
society – in that it promised either a permanent smouldering war
or total destruction. Détente symbolically dissolved the distinction
between the ‘experience of the front’ (the words of the distinguished
Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka) and the safe hinterland normally
associated with wars before the twentieth century. Memories of satu-
ration bombing and fire-bombing of whole cities and civilian popula-
tions returned. The apocalypse of the front, in which troops struggle
to endure a night of absurdity and horrible death in order to secure
for others ‘back home’ a life of peace, became generalised. The fright-
ening image of the front acquired a significance for the whole of civil
society.
By giving public form and direction to this generalised anxiety,
the British peace movement generated deep support within all strata
of civil society, as well as within governmental institutions. But the
cultivation of repulsion for the menacing possibility of total war was
not its only achievement. As its vigorous campaigns for nuclear-free
zones demonstrated at the time, the movement heightened the com-
mon sense of civil society that its hard-won democratic freedoms were
at stake. The half-baked nuclear peace, the ‘cold war’ of which Orwell
had written, the game in which the antagonists mobilise in order to
demobilise their opponents, was felt widely to accelerate the militari-
sation of society and to promote the growth of the dictatorial elements
deeply ingrained within the parliamentary state. So the movement
helped important parts of civil society to conclude that there had been
a violation of the ‘contract’ between civil society and the state – an
old theme in British political culture, according to which individual
citizens intuitively grant their loyalty to the state in return for its
guarantee of their personal freedom and security. The conclusion that
this contract had been violated explains why the reaction of the peace
movement and civil society against nuclear weapons was not (as was
claimed at the time by Cornelius Castoriadis and others) a ‘zoological’

defence of mere life, the slave-like expression of the inability to fight
(and to die) for freedom. The peace movement was not merely a fearful
reaction against the possibility of death by nuclear battle. It was also
a civilising resistance to intrusive and violent forms of state power
that were capable of extinguishing the plurality of independent and
peaceful associations that are the stuff of which civil society (ideally)
consists.
Why violence?
The exercise of violence cannot be avoided when conflicting interests

are at stake.
Sigmund Freud (1932)
the roots of incivility

The contributions of constitutional initiatives and civilian peace
efforts to the vast project of democratising the means of governmen-
tal violence are important. In the age of triangulated violence, they
warn against defeatism by forcing us to rethink the old objection that
democracy always degenerates into violence. One of the first versions
of that celebrated dogma appeared in the eighth book of Plato’s Repub-
lic, where democracy is described not as the government of the people
but of the poor against the rich. The guiding principle of democracy
is said to be liberty, which is quickly transformed into licence due to
democrats’ lack of public and private restraint. Such licentiousness of
the people is reinforced by their indulgence of superfluous needs and
immodest desires, their lack of respect for law and their general ten-
dency to question authority, so that the old condescend to the young,
parents fear their children, ‘the master fears and flatters his scholars
and the scholars despise their masters and tutors’. Polybius repeated
this later famous line of attack:
For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of

others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others,
as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded
from the honours of office by his penury, institute the rule of
violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and
plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find
once more a master and monarch.1
1
Plato, The Republic, 8, sect. 563a, in B. Jowett (ed.), The Dialogues of Plato (New
York 1897); Polybius, The General History of Polybius (London 1756), bk. 6, sect. 9.
This spiteful view of democracy as synonymous with violent

struggles for power, repeated in Reinhart Koselleck’s influential cri-
tique of eighteenth-century intellectuals’ loss of concern over the dan-
gers of civil war and their love affair with democratic ‘Revolution’,2 is
contradicted both by democratic efforts to constitutionalise political
power and by the involvement of citizens in anti-violence and peace
movements. Civilian peace initiatives in particular may be seen as
part of an older social tradition that dates back to the nineteenth-
century campaigns against the trafficking of women, slaves and chil-
dren. This many-sided civility politics specialises in repairing the torn
fabric of civil societies. Not only does it target the violence of govern-
mental institutions, it also seeks to name and root out the violence
within actually existing civil societies. This civility politics today
encompasses such diverse themes as campaigns against homicide and
the rape and stalking of women; road rage and violence projected onto
children; racial abuse and bullying in schools; cruelty to animals; and
the more or less concealed violence that infects disciplinary institu-
tions like prisons, asylums and hospitals.
Among the ironic effects of these social campaigns is to heighten
the perception of many citizens that civil societies as we know and
experience them are in fact riddled with pockets of violence, some of
them dangerous – and that they are in urgent need of more and better
surveillance and policing, as well as new forms of legal regulation,
social policy or outright repression. In practice, this sense that vio-
lence is omnipresent is reinforced by many other factors, ranging from
the risk and safety requirements of insurance companies to govern-
ment ‘law and order’ campaigns and citizens’ willingness to use their
mobile phones to report violence to the authorities. Their combined
long-term effect is to highlight to the members of civil society their
own propensities to violence – and to flag the need to do something
2
Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen
Welt (Munich 1959).
w h y v i o l e n c e ? 91
about them. These forces not only ensure that statistical ‘facts’ about
violence are always and necessarily ‘fictitious’ (a point well noted by
criminologists). These forces also cast doubt upon the claim of Elias
and others that ‘civilised’ societies forget their historical origins, that
they take for granted their own civility, as if it were ‘natural’.
This last point can be toughened, for all known forms of civil
society are plagued by endogenous sources of incivility. On empiri-
cal grounds alone, it is imperative to reject simple-minded, ‘purist’
accounts of civil society as havens of sub-tropical calm. True, civil
societies as we know them generate socialising conflicts. Antago-
nisms and cooperation tend to form a durable helix, in that through
their disagreements civilians learn that social life consists in recipro-
cal concessions. Civilians rub along together by learning more about
each other; they cotton on to the arts of mutual adjustment and of har-
monising expectations.3 Yet despite these socialising trends, incivility
is also chronically produced by all known civil societies. Incivility is
one of their limits and, hence, a permanent thorn in the side of the
goal of creating a fully ‘civilised’ civil society. ‘Gradually violence
on the part of the existing powers will diminish and obedience to
the laws will increase’, predicted Kant when reflecting on the advan-
tages of republican government and civil society: ‘There will arise
in the body politic perhaps more charity and less strife in legal dis-
putes, more reliability in keeping one’s word, and so on, partly due to
love of honour, partly out of well-understood self-interest.’4 The pre-
sumed or implied positively teleological relationship between civil
societies and violence in this formulation is unwarranted. Civil soci-
eties, contrary to Kant, are not necessarily synonymous with the drift
3
R. J. Rummel, Understanding Conflict and War (Beverly Hills and London 1981),
vol. V, p. 32.
4
Immanuel Kant, ‘Welchen Ertrag wird der Fortschritt zum besseren dem Men-
schengeschiecht abwerfen?’ (1798), in Der Streit der Facultäten in drey Abschnit-
ten, in Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik
(Darmstadt 1975), pt. 2, sect. 2, p. 365.
towards ‘perpetual peace’. Highly developed civil societies can and

do contain violent tendencies. Sometimes these ‘uncivil’ propensities
accumulate and combine, through feed-back and feed-forward loops,
to the point where a civil society can or does commit something like
sociocide. It then degenerates into an uncivil society, a more or less
legally framed ensemble of social institutions that are dominated by
‘uncivil’ forms of interaction, ranging from everyday rudeness tinged
with veiled threats of bodily harm to others, through to ‘post-civilised
barbarity’,5 ugly forms of systematically organised violence that rip
the guts out of all remaining civil society institutions.
This inner contradiction within the workings of civil society –
that it tends to produce its own antithesis – has been poorly analysed.
It has been obscured by the originally eighteenth-century theory of the
upward spiral towards civilisation and, more recently, by the strange
silence about violence within purist accounts of civil society. A key
question has been ignored: what exactly is the source of this troubling
contradiction?
The most common explanation of incivility resorts to ontologi-
cal considerations. ‘We see even in well-governed states, where there
are laws and punishments appointed for offenders’, wrote Hobbes,
‘particular men travel not without their sword by their sides for their
defences; neither sleep they without shutting not only their doors
against fellow subjects, but also their trunks and coffers for fear of
domestics’. Incivility is here treated as a primeval energy:
the condition of Man . . . is a condition of Warre of every one

against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own
Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be
a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It
5
Claus Offe, ‘Moderne “Barbarei”: Der Naturzustand im Kleinformat’, in Max Miller
and Hans-Georg Soeffner (eds.), Modernität und Barbarei. Soziologische Zeitdiag-
nose am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt 1996); and Stephen Mennel, ‘Decivil-
ising processes. Theoretical significance and some limits of research’, International
Sociology (1990), pp. 205–23.
followeth that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every

thing; even to one anothers body.6
Three-and-a-half centuries later, Hobbes’s reasoning still enjoys

a reputation. Partly this is because we have not yet shaken off the
old bourgeois fascination with neo-Hobbesian themes – Peter Gay’s
compelling study has shown just how strong was this fascination dur-
ing the past century7 – and partly because the view of human nature
as violent has a certain intuitive appeal, especially when ‘the facts’
seem to speak for themselves. What else but dastardly human nature
is behind such evil acts as government soldiers who chop off their
victims’ ears or genitals, and force them at gunpoint to chew them,
before suffering execution? Surely the willingness of soldiers to force
mothers at gunpoint to shoot their own terrified children through the
head before an assembled crowd, only then to shoot the killers and
the crowd itself, proves that we have an inborn need to be violent?
What else explains the perversely sadistic pleasure of the torturer who
places a rat inside his victim, so beginning the slow process of death
by cruel humiliation? Or the cold-blooded character of men who are
prepared to kill thousands of innocent civilians using bolt-cutters and
mobile phones to turn civilian aircraft into cruise missiles?
There can be no doubt – as traditions of psychoanalysis have
emphasised – that in order to understand such acts of violence it is
vital to have an understanding of the character structure or personal-
ity formation of the individual perpetrator, who, although he or she
often acts in concert with a wider group of perpetrators, is at some
point caught in the act of violence alone with the victim, pushed
along by inner instincts and thoughts. Armies or gangs alone do not
kill, not even when violence is administered by war machines that
6
Thomas Hobbes, ‘Preface to the Reader’, Philosophical Rudiments concerning Gov-
ernment and Society (London 1651) and Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power
of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (London 1651), pt. 1, ch. 14.
7
Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred. The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
(London 1994).
physically or visually distance the violent from the violated. And yet
when seeking to understand why individuals are violent it is clear that
a distinction needs to be drawn between two different types of micro-
level or ‘human nature’ explanations. Stretching from St Augustine
to Freud, each seeks to trace the causes of violence to human nature
itself.
There are first of all those ahistorical ‘hard’ ontologies that sup-
pose that Man is essentially wicked (as in Machiavelli’s claim that all
men at all times are ‘ungrateful, changeable, simulators and dissim-
ulators, runaways in danger, eager for gain’8 ). Such ontologies have
difficulty side-stepping institutionally based explanations that help
to account for why and how individuals and, indeed, whole societies,
are from time to time pacific, sometimes for extended periods. Then,
secondly, there are those ‘softer’ ontologies that admit that although
‘human nature’ tends to be perverted, or even naturally bloodthirsty,
it can, under certain institutional circumstances, be diverted or har-
nessed into pacific ways. William James’s proposal that the world
would become a safer place if its youth were drafted into mining coal,
manning ships, building skyscrapers, washing dishes and laundering
clothes, is an example of this ‘soft’ form of ontology. So too is the
eighteenth-century (but originally premodern) formulation that civil
societies are handcuffed (as Mirabeau put it) to a tragic ‘natural cycle
from barbarism to decadence by way of civilisation and wealth’.9
The trouble with ‘human nature’ approaches to violence is not
only that they tend to paralyse policy innovations by implying, ulti-
mately, that little or nothing can be done to stem the floods of vio-
lence that periodically sweep away the protective walls of civility
that maintain peace among citizens, but it is also difficult to substan-
tiate them in either theoretical or empirical/interpretative terms. In
8
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in Machiavelli. The Chief Works and Others, trans.
Alan Gilbert, 3 vols (Durham, NC 1965), vol. I, p. 62.
9
William James, ‘The moral equivalent of war’, in Memories and Studies (New York
1912), pp. 262–72, 290; Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, L’Ami des
hommes ou Traité de la population (Paris 1756), p. 176.
both their ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms, attempts to explain violence with
sole reference to the meanness of ‘human nature’ are forced to admit
of the explanatory importance of socio-institutional factors. Broadly
speaking, two different types of explanations are available.10 One of
them (already examined in the discussion of the legacy of the work
of Elias and Bauman) points to the exogenous factors – the world’s
system of armed territorial government – that stir up violence and
produce the implosion and breakdown of civil societies. The other
type of explanation insists that violence on a limited or extended
scale derives primarily from the historically specific organising princi-
ples of civil society itself. Here another important distinction should
be drawn: between capitalism-centred explanations and more com-
prehensive civil society-centred explanations of why these societies
tend to generate from within themselves various types of threatening
violence.
The most influential example of the former is Marx’s empha-
sis on the conflict potential of the wage-labour/capital relationship.
The modern bourgeois era, Marx pointed out, is unique because it
effects a separation of government from social forms of stratifica-
tion. It sub-divides the human species for the first time into social
classes; divorces individuals’ legal status from their socio-economic
role within civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft); and sunders each
individual into private egoist and public-spirited citizen. By contrast,
feudal society had a directly ‘political’ character. The main elements
of civil life (property, the household, forms of labour) assumed the
form of landlordism, estates and corporations. The individual mem-
bers of feudal society enjoyed no ‘private sphere’; their fate was bound
up inextricably with the network of interlocking ‘public’ organisa-
tions to which they belonged. The ‘throwing off of the political yoke’ is
a distinguishing mark of modern bourgeois orders, according to Marx.
Civil society, the realm of private needs and interests, waged labour
10
Compare the differently formulated account of these types of explanation in Kenneth
N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York, 1959).
and private right, is emancipated from political control; it becomes

the basis and presupposition of the modern state.
Civil society is represented by Marx – correctly – as a contin-
gent historical phenomenon, and not as a naturally given state of
affairs. Modern, state-guaranteed civil societies do not conform to
eternal laws of nature, and they certainly do not arise from their
members’ propensity for ‘society’. They are historically determinate
entities, characterised by particular forms and relations of production,
class divisions and struggles, and protected for a time by ‘correspond-
ing’ political-legal mechanisms. Not only are bourgeois civil societies
products of modern times. Their life expectancy is limited, inasmuch
as they give birth to the proletariat, the class with radical chains,
the class in civil society that is not of civil society, the potentially
universal class that signals the dissolution of all classes, if need be
through violence. Although he was not alone in this conviction, Marx
was right to pinpoint the wage-labour/capital relationship as a poten-
tial point of violent antagonism within modern civil societies. The
Marxian theses on civil society are nevertheless riddled with prob-
lems,11 among which are Marx’s mistaken assumption that lumpen-
proletarian and proletarian mugging and murder would give way to
the organised militancy of the working class, and especially his poor
grasp of both the violence-producing and shock-absorbing potential of
non-market institutions within civil society.
In well-established civil societies, there is a comparatively lim-
ited scope for the display of strong feelings, of strong antipathies
towards people, let alone heated anger, wild hatred or the urge to belt
someone over the head. Wherever stress- or humiliation-induced ten-
sions develop, they tend to be absorbed or sublimated into the social
structures, and civility prevails, or so Elias argues. ‘Most human soci-
eties’, he writes, ‘as far as one can see, develop some counter-measures
11
See my Democracy and Civil Society. On the Predicaments of European Socialism,
the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political
Power (London and New York 1988 [1998]), pp. 57–64, 215–28.
against stress-tensions they themselves generate. In the case of soci-

eties at a relatively late level of civilisation, that is with relatively
stable, even and temperate restraints all round and with strong sub-
limatory demands, one can usually observe a considerable variety of
leisure activities with that function, of which sport is one.’12 If that is
so, then a fundamental question remains unanswered: why is it that
the rules of taken-for-granted niceness do not always apply in actually
existing civil societies? Why are their members unable to live comfort-
ably on Pleasant Street, in Friendly Town, in the County of Civility,
in the Country of Charitable Works? Why do the ‘shock-absorbing’
institutions of civil societies tend to be overburdened, such that they
generate from within their own structures patterns of violence that
contradict the freedom, solidarity and civility that otherwise makes
them so attractive?
A distinctive feature of civil societies is that they provide var-
ious – contestable – answers to these questions, and it is on balance
a good thing that they do so. By cultivating the sense that violence
has social roots, and that it is therefore contingent and removable,
explanatory controversies about violence keep civil societies on their
toes. Perhaps that is why boredom has often been cited as the key cause
of incivility. According to this interpretation, the bored are well-fed
victims of the bland homogeneity produced by civil societies, partic-
ularly in the field of consumption. The consumer society – note the
unconvincing stereotype – produces two kinds of people, the bores
and the bored. The latter may still go through the motions of civil-
ity, but stuck in their boredom they begin to feel constricted and to
crave variety and release. They are constantly on the lookout for the
strange, the exotic, the dangerous. Not surprisingly, they take their
revenge by committing acts of ‘anomic’ violence that are rarely expe-
rienced as loss, or as a lapse into nothingness. The hard fact, say the
12
Norbert Elias, ‘Introduction’, in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excite-
ment. Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (Oxford and Cambridge, MA 1993),
p. 41.
analysts of boredom, is that violence is experienced as pleasure, as

fulfilment, as a form of excitement that tickles the fancy of not only
the violated – expressed in masochistic pleasure – but also the violent
and the witnesses of acts of violence. Individuals who are violent,
alone with their victims, sometimes treat their actions as entertain-
ment, as in the case (described by Arthur Miller) of the young misfit
‘stuck with his boredom, stuck inside it, stuck to it, until for two
or three minutes he “lives”; he goes on a raid around the corner and
feels the thrill of risking his skin or his life as he smashes a bottle
filled with gasoline on some other kid’s head. It is life . . . stand-
ing around with nothing coming up is as close to dying as you can
get.’13
Boredom theories of violence are interesting, but given their
symptomatic quality – they ignore the dynamics of both psyches and
social institutions – they turn out to be rather more provocative than
persuasive. Explanations that trace violence to the openness and plu-
ralism that are characteristic of civil societies get closer to the mark.
In effect, the argument is that these societies’ nurturing of a plural-
ity of forms of life that are themselves experienced as contingent is
at the root of their tendency to violence. Various – potentially con-
flicting – examples are cited. According to some observers, the well-
recognised fact that they enable groups to organise for the pursuit
of wealth and power has made their capitalist economies and politi-
cal institutions not only restlessly dynamic at home, but also prone
to expansion on a global scale, one consequence of which has been
the widespread exporting of violence to tribes, regions, nations and
whole civilisations considered ‘rude’ or ‘savage’. Modern civil soci-
eties have indeed provided handsome opportunities for certain power
groups tempted by dreams of expansionism. This has ensured in turn
13
Arthur Miller, The Misfits (London 1961), p. 51; cf. his ‘The bored and the Violent’,
in Shalom Endleman (ed.), Violence in the Streets (London 1969), pp. 270–9. A dif-
ferent version of the boredom theory is suggested in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins
of Totalitarianism (Cleveland 1958), p. 82, where late nineteenth-century Parisian
high society developed a fascination with ‘underworlds’, the bizarre, the dangerous.
that the whole modern history of colonisation and bullying of the

‘uncivilised’ has been riddled with violence, to the point where it may
be said, with a touch of bitter irony, that the current world-wide appeal
of civil society is the bastard child of the violence of metropolitan
civility.
The legal or informal freedom to associate in complex ways
afforded the members of any civil society evidently also makes them
prone – despite generous reserves of civility – to violence at home. It is
not simply that civil societies provide convenient hideouts and stalk-
ing grounds for psychopaths, who take advantage of civility in order
better to maim it. Nor is it just because of the increasing availability
and cheapness of weapons of violence within actually existing civil
societies. These societies no doubt facilitate the free flow of cheap
arms – German-made Brocock ME38 air pistols, Uzi submachineguns
from Israel, US Mac 10 machine pistols – although the degree to which
they do so remains uncertain, which is why half-hysterical media
claims about ‘gun crime’ and the need for ‘gun control’ should be
tempered with sober reflection on both the multiple roots and forms
of violence, together with the ways in which the resort to arms are
symptomatic of the deeper tendency of civil societies to disorientate
and discriminate against their members.
Civil societies, ideal-typically conceived, are complex and
dynamic webs of social institutions in which the opacity of the social
ensemble – citizens’ inability to conceive of and to grasp the hori-
zons of social life – combined with the chronic uncertainty of key
aspects of life (employment and investment patterns, who will gov-
ern after the next elections, the contingent identity of one’s self and
one’s household) makes their members prone to stress, anxiety, humil-
iation and revenge. All modern civil societies are more or less caught
in the grip of what Heinrich von Kleist called the ‘fragile consti-
tution of the world’ (die gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt). Such
fragility increases the probability that the customary moral sanctions
and restraints upon the resort to violence can be rejected or avoided
by some of their members. Especially when combined with social
discrimination, say in the form of racial prejudice and joblessness,

this amoral anxiety and frustration – the perception of being ‘diss’d’ –
adds to the ranks of the losers.
Losing against others is a chronic problem within civil societies.
They no doubt encourage their members to perform successfully – and
to believe in the chances of successful performance. Choices that are
never hard to make, excellent health, an undamageable body, illim-
itable energies, unshakeable self-confidence, fabulous unbroken luck,
fully realisable ambitions, inexhaustible sexual vitality and contin-
uous erotic gratification – which members of actually existing civil
societies in their right minds would ever pass up acceptance of these
gifts if they were offered them, with no strings attached? The question
is of course self-answering, but the reply veils a troubling difficulty. It
is the impossibility of every mortal member of a civil society getting
their way and realising their dreams that can and does breed loathing,
or something much worse. Hannah Arendt has pointed out that if we
examine the historical cases in which the engagés were transformed
into enragés, then hypocrisy much more than injustice has been the
driving force.14 Profound hatred for ‘bourgeois’ society and its double-
standards is certainly evident in the writings of those authors – Pareto,
Sorel, Céline, Fanon – who glorify violence for violence’s sake. The
same burning desire to tear the mask of hypocrisy from civil soci-
ety is common among those who tear into its structures with knives
and guns and bombs. Their response is not ‘irrational’ since the fail-
ure of civil societies to live up to their own standards of openness,
freedom and justice for all – their inability to prevent the humilia-
tion of some of their members – makes them vulnerable to those who
become hell-bent on revealing hypocrisy’s conceits. That is probably
one reason why – shamefully – the homicide rate among black Amer-
icans is seven times higher than for whites; why nearly two-thirds of
persons arrested for murder and violent robbery are black; why half
14
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London), pp. 65–6.
the population of US gaols is black; and why one black man in five is
incarcerated – even though black people represent only around 12 per
cent of the overall population.
The creation and humiliation of losers should worry the friends
of civil society because there is plenty of psychoanalytic evidence that
in certain circumstances humiliation encourages violent responses,
sometimes directed by the downtrodden against themselves.15 Con-
sider one randomly chosen case: that of Charles Starkweather (about
whose crimes the movie Badlands was made). Starkweather grew up
in poverty and family neglect in small-town Nebraska, where in early
1958 he killed and mutilated eleven people in a week-long shoot-
ing spree. Bow-legged, of unprepossessing physical appearance and red
hair, he was known locally as ‘garbage man’. His autobiography, writ-
ten just before his execution, explains that well before the murders he
committed he had felt himself to be garbage, a loser. His self had long
ago died – an experience so intolerable that as a man he preferred his
own and others’ physical death to the humiliation he had experienced
as ‘life’.16
The dynamics linked to cases like Starkweather’s are often
bizarre, and tragic. Broken object relations with parents during early
childhood, especially the experience of neglectful mothers, or fathers
who are absent, sometimes produces a condition far worse than emo-
tional sadness: it results in the failure of subjects to mentalise their
own selves or the mental selves of those around them. Those who fail
15
The literature is vast, and contested. A sample of the best includes James Gilligan,
Preventing Violence (London 2000); Adam Jukes, ‘Violence, helplessness, vulnerabil-
ity and male sexuality’, Free Associations, 4:1, 29 (1993), pp. 25–43 and Rosine Perel-
berg (ed.), Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide (London 1999).
Note that humiliation can slake a thirst for violence within whole societies, as in
the nationalistic ‘militarism of the little people’ that developed in Germany during
the late nineteenth century. See Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen
Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich 1990).
16
James M. Reinhardt, The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather (Springfield, IL
1960), pp. 49–50: ‘The people I murdered had murdered me. They murdered me slow
like. I was better to them. I killed them in a hurry.’
to mentalise themselves and their surrounding world feel as if they are

nothing, and that nothingness makes them prone to project their own
chaos forcibly upon others, or back on to their own selves. They suffer
from the profound fear of losing everything. Violence is a desperate
effort to shore up their weak or absent selves, either through self-
harm (‘if I kill myself then I won’t have to think about what I think’)
or through the violation of others (‘if I kill you I won’t have to think
about what you think’). The violence may be deluded, but that very
delusion, paradoxically, provides a safe refuge against the battering
that has been taken by the self. Like oxygen, violence momentarily
breathes life back into a self that has suffered asphyxiation, choked
on whatever remained of a self that barely resembled a self in the first
place.
The practical upshot of these assorted violence-producing
dynamics within actually existing civil societies is to create archipela-
gos of incivility within their midst: a murder here, a rape or battering
there. Then serial murders, even pockets of violence in whole geo-
graphic areas that have strongly ‘medieval’ qualities. Just as in the
Middle Ages men always carried arms, never lightly ventured beyond
the towns, and feared that the forests were full of frightening foes, so
the white middle-class inhabitants of cities such as New Orleans –
where each year there are around 250 murders, 200 reported rapes,
1,500 armed robberies and over 2,000 assaults – choose never to go to
New Orleans East; they try to avoid taking public transport alone
after midnight (or earlier, if they are women); and they are wary of
setting foot after dark in certain quarters of districts like Bywater and
Faubourg St John.
violence as enter tainment

But there is another, less obvious reason why the fragile openness
of civil societies contributes to their violent feel: their dependence
upon networked systems of public and private communication. These
media ensure that images of violence are circulated more or less
freely and instantly to large numbers of people. That freedom of
communication within civil societies in turn ensures that violence

against others can and is often turned into entertainment, that is,
made the object of popular fascination, thrill and pleasure.
Cruel forms of group pleasure in being violent – like Serbian
soldiers swilling šljivovica and singing their way through scores of
daily murders in Bosnia – is nowadays common (if still puzzling)
news. More common and puzzling still is the fascination and plea-
sure experienced by millions of people when confronted by violence
in the form of entertainment. Contrary to the claims of some con-
temporary campaigners against violence in the media, the packaging
and marketing of violence as entertainment is an old phenomenon
traceable to the middle of the eighteenth century. Pay-TV sexual
murders, violent video games, vomit-provoking splatter films, and
musicians who cavort with death, safety pins jammed through their
bloodied noses, rapping about guns and murder, midnight ramblers,
psycho-killers and sympathy for the devil, are by now fairly ancient
themes of modern popular culture. The tradition of entertaining vio-
lence stretches back through films such as Night of the Living Dead
and Psycho to magazine ghost stories, horrid melodramas, newspaper
sensationalism and the Gothic literature and Graveyard poets of the
Enlightenment. There is admittedly insufficient historical research on
these public representations of violence, yet it is clear that in modern
times sensations and scandals generated by violence are older than
the trial of O. J. Simpson and the Washington Sniper. The scaffold,
for example, was a dominant emotive symbol in early nineteenth-
century England. The totemic image of the ‘hanged man’ pervaded
popular culture, for instance appearing on tarot cards and in dream
books, and in Punch and Judy shows. The tanned skin of the executed
was used to bind books about his or her crimes; and death masks of
hanged criminals attracted big crowds at Madame Tussaud’s. A paral-
lel transformation of violence into entertainment, this time involving
the violated female corpse, surfaced in Weimar Germany, whose civil
society, consumed by fear of inside and outside threats, was riveted by
Jack the Ripper’s deeds in Wedekind’s Lulu plays, Otto Dix’s paintings
of disembowelled prostitutes and Alfred Döblin’s sexualisation of the

murder of Rosa Luxemburg.17
With the advent of mass circulation and niche-marketed, elec-
tronic media operating on a global scale, the age span, size and spa-
tial reach of audiences potentially interested in violent entertainment
grows exponentially. The point is reached where the spectators of vio-
lence virtually anywhere in the world can be titillated by hair-raising
gore so explicit that it seems unsurpassable in terms of technical per-
fection and verisimilitude. Why so many millions – gasping and shud-
dering involuntarily, cold sweat on their brows, upstanding hairs on
the nape of their necks – are fascinated by the violent things they
might otherwise be expected to run screaming from is an enigma.
It lends credence to the originally Freudian thesis of the uncanny
(das Unheimliche), according to which death, for which there is no
known cure and which is the inevitable destiny of all individuals, is
(in civilised societies) ‘kept from sight . . . withheld from others’. That
rendering of death as a stranger boomerangs back on the individual.
It heightens his or her sense that death, the ultimate consequence
of violence, is ‘uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal . . . ghastly’.18
Freud supposed, misleadingly, that the experience of the uncanny, the
primitive fear of the dead that inhabits the strange realm between
the living and the dead, was a universal human experience. He did
not see that the uncanny can and does assume different historical
forms, so that for instance in premodern systems definitions of the
17
See the account, which is based upon source materials from newspapers, criminal
archives and popular ballads, by V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree. Execution and
the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford 1994). The nineteenth-century development
of unbridled newspaper sensationalism of acts of violence – the insistence on the
hot currency of the news, claims for the unique ferocity of murders, the reportage
of gruesome details – is traced in Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of
Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York 1989). The
Weimar fetish of violence against women is documented in Maria Tatar, Lustmord.
Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton 1995).
18
Sigmund Freud, ‘The uncanny’ (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works, ed. James Strachey (London 1955), vol. XVII, pp. 219–52. Among
the interesting recent discussions of death and the uncanny are Walter Kendrick,
The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (New York 1991).
uncanny tended to he monopolised and strictly defined by core insti-

tutions such as religious authorities, warrior classes and local com-
munities. Understood in this historically sensitive way, the theory
of the uncanny has a striking implication for accounts of democracy
and violence, which need to be reformulated thus: the invention and
growth of modern forms of civil society are not synonymous with the
extrusion of violence into the state sphere, where it becomes more or
less invisible. Precisely because the power to define the uncanny is no
longer monopolised by well-defined authorities – churches, communi-
ties and professional armies lose their grip on the meaning of death –
the uncanny becomes ‘homeless’. There develops something like a
dialectics of civility, in which the visible reduction and practical
removal of various forms of violence from civil society is matched
by their heightened media visibility. Violence reappears in the form
of more or less gratuitous forms of ‘simulated’ or ‘virtual’ violence.
child murder
The pleasurable experience of witnessing ‘virtual’ acts of violence is
one thing. The actual violence committed against others within civil
society is another matter. The key point is that within all civil soci-
eties there are times and places in which civilians experience psychic
confusion and social fatigue, even the feeling that life (as the Russians
say) is an empty lawless space (prostranstvo) founded on humiliation.
Under such conditions, these civilians begin to harbour resentments
and grudges. In desperation, they may be tempted to avenge their
humiliation, confusion and frustration – to expose the hypocrisy they
see around them – by taking it out on others physically. One exam-
ple should suffice to illustrate the micro-violence hidden away in the
interstices of civil society – the case of child murder within house-
holds.
Although the use of violence as a means of resolving differ-
ences with others, like charity, typically begins at home, child mur-
der understandably remains a strange and disturbing phenomenon.
The officially recorded number of child murders in countries such as
Britain, France and the United States has substantially increased in

recent decades. Doubts about evidence certainly apply; official statis-
tics are often methodologically vague, heavily dependent upon meth-
ods of reporting and categorisation, and politically correct. There is
also still no adequate history of modern household violence against
children. Yet the latest available figures do present a picture of the
patterns of uncivil treatment of children.
During the past forty years in the United States, the recorded
number of children murdered during the first year of their lives has
doubled; there has been a quadrupling of the murder rate among one-
to four-year olds. Each year, more than a 1,000 children are mur-
dered and more than 18,000 are permanently disabled by domestic
violence. The micro-patterns are revealing. Four-fifths of children are
murdered in their homes, by their parents. Reflecting the amount
of time spent with children, women are disproportionately respon-
sible for two-thirds of recorded cases. Almost half of all murders
involve children aged less than one year; four-fifths are aged under
four. Just over half of the victims are white and female, but among
black Americans the incidence of child murder is higher: around 20
children in every 100,000 are slain, around 30 per cent of the total.19
The trends generate huge media coverage and in consequence child
murder, like other forms of violence, appears to move closer to those
who previously had heard of, but had never seen, such hideousness. It
has come to light that some 60 per cent of those charged with murder
are the parents of the child, which casts a lurid light on the cherished
term ‘blood relations’. Especially anguishing for many commentators
are the stories of murderous mothers, trapped in the hell and heaven of
contemporary motherhood, who suffocate their children with exhaust
fumes, or strap them into safety seats before rolling the family car
19
See the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information, Child
Maltreatment 1996: Reports from the States to the National Center on Child Abuse
and Neglect (Washington, DC 1996); R. W. Zalar et al., ‘Domestic violence’, New
England Journal of Medicine, 342 (11 May 2000), pp. 1450–3; and Gerald L. Rowles,
‘Domestic violence’, http://www.dadi.org/dvca glr.htm
into a lake, shake them into unconsciousness or stab their children

to death before taking their own lives.
Many shocked commentators have reacted a-politically to such
dastardly acts. They talk (in the traditional language of the doctrine
of original sin) of ‘evil’ acts, all the while illustrating their point
with spine-chilling, Hitchcockian details of the protagonists’ lives; or
(a not-unrelated explanation) their commentaries revive Hobbesian
assumptions by highlighting the murderous effects of the ‘me-first
society’ (Newt Gingrich) spawned by the cultural politics of the 1960s.
Such commentators would do well to pause before they judge so
simple-mindedly. They should understand that perceptions of child
murder (like all other forms of violence) have a history; that prose-
cutions of child murder were rare before the sixteenth century; and
that, thereafter, for two centuries, a legal clampdown on poor and
unwed mothers accused of killing their new-born infants and con-
cealing their remains produced official child murder statistics that
were unquestionably higher than they are today.20
Keeping the latter figures in historical perspective is vital, and
indeed those who rush to condemn child murder as ‘sin’ and ‘evil’
are better advised to study the phenomenon with the Spinozist motto
at their side: ‘Smile not, lament not, nor condemn; but understand’
(Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere). They should
as well strive to situate their judgements within the potentially fruit-
ful framework of interpretation that links violence with the dynamics
of civil societies. In many recorded cases of child murder, it is clear
that both victims and villains are trapped in those high-tension zones
of civil society where the conflict-ridden logics of the household (inti-
macy, sexual desire, identity formation, personal habits, marriage,
20
See, for example, Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanti-
cide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York 1981); René Leboutte,
‘Offense against family order: infanticide in Belgium from the fifteenth through the
early twentieth centuries’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991), pp. 159–85;
and Keith Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in European history’, Criminal Justice History, 3
(1982), pp. 1–20.
money, the hard work of cooking, cleaning and childcare) interact

with, reinforce and often contradict virtually the same list of conflict-
ridden logics of both the labour market (with its additional, special
stresses and strains of employment, unemployment and underem-
ployment) and the social relations in which it is embedded. Seen
within the context of these typical stresses and strains of civil society,
the much-vaunted explanation of ‘evil’ selfishness has no veracity. It
fails to acknowledge these stresses and strains. It ignores contribut-
ing factors like the experience of humiliation, confusion, fatigue; and
it takes no account of the ambivalent feelings of love and hate of
mothers and fathers, whose lack of mutuality and social support (the
absence of men from parenting, the lack of proper childcare provision,
the underprovision of adequate benefits for women who have lost the
support of men) push them into a cul-de-sac. Trapped, the only way
out is a crazed decision to murder another member of civil society,
and perhaps even themselves. At that point, literally, the pressures of
civil society kill its own offspring.
Uncivil wars
[T]he dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief and the dry stone
no water . .
T. S. Eliot (1922)
In well-functioning, long-established civil societies such incivility

is only a mild trend. The tendency of civil society to kill itself, to
degenerate into incivility on a grand scale, is normally kept in check
by a combination of self-restraint, acts of charity, simple kindness,
media coverage and intervention by others, whether families, friends,
strangers, social care professionals or the courts and the police. But
whenever these mechanisms weaken or break down, civility evapo-
rates, sometimes overnight. Actually existing civil society then begins
to resemble an uncivil society.1 There develops a battleground, in
which the stronger – thanks to the survival of some social bonds and
certain civil liberties – enjoy the licence to twist the arms and clip the
ears of the weaker. Under extreme conditions, an uncivil society can
haemorrhage to death. Uncivil war looms; then it erupts, with a fury.
The distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence is destroyed. Social
and political constraints on vengeance dissolve. Reprisals double, then
1
When using the old-fashioned adjective ‘uncivil’, it should be clear that I am not refer-
ring to the various forms of action, originally described by Henry David Thoreau’s
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849), as civil disobedience, that is, vigorous acts
of deliberate law-breaking, or extroverted acts of disputed legality, whose stated aim
is to bring before a public either the alleged illegitimacy or ethical or political inde-
fensibility of certain government laws or corporate or state policies. So understood,
civil disobedience is not synonymous with incivility, even though such disobedience
is often denounced as ‘uncivilised’ or ‘lawless’ or violent by those who fear, or who
disapprove of it. Thoreau himself publicly defended a decision not to pay taxes to a
government which sanctioned slavery, while Mahatma Gandhi, who did more than
anybody in the twentieth century to popularise the strategy of civil disobedience,
helped forcibly to obstruct British imperial government. In each case, and in sub-
sequent cases when civil disobedience has been used as a strategy of agitation for
change, those who engage in acts of provocation and confrontation are deliberately
committed to non-violence, both as a means of contesting illegitimate power and for
the purpose of strengthening the institutions of civil society.
triple. Blood appears everywhere: on walls, on the ground, underfoot in

deep pools. Victims are shot at, herded at gunpoint from their burning
homes. They are summarily executed in nearby houses, or marched
in columns to railway sidings, past rotting corpses, to be trucked off
to makeshift concentration camps, where they are raped or castrated
and then made to wait, with bulging eyes and lanternous faces, for the
arrival of their own death.
The problem of uncivil war has already been mentioned, but
since (along with nuclear anarchy and terrorism) it poses such a direct
challenge to democracy as we know it, its contours are worth exam-
ining in more depth. The details are complex, and ugly. The scale
and ferocity of violence produced by uncivil wars have fascinated,
shocked and sickened the whole world. Words cannot easily describe
their cruelty, and their attempted theorisation seems at first glance
to be a self-indulgent act of blandiloquence. Those who attempt to
reflect on such patterns of violence are easily gripped by feelings of
shame that they are uninvited witnesses of events littered by corpses
sweet with the smell of doom.
This experience of uncomprehending shame is perhaps one key
reason why the kind of modern theorising of bloody conflict famously
initiated by Thomas Hobbes’s Behemoth: The History of The Causes
of The Civil Wars of England, and of The Counsels and Artifices By
Which They Were Carried On From The Year 1640 To The Year 1660
(1668) has been badly neglected of late. There is still too little the-
oretical reflection upon the wars of our time – which is scandalous
considering the sheer volume of armed conflict that has spread to the
four corners of the earth. Admittedly, after the end of the Cold War,
there is a great deal of confusion about how to interpret these violent
conflicts. There is growing agreement that the distinction between
war and peace is as questionable now as it was during the Cold War
period, but for different reasons. That period, marked by bipolar ideo-
logical and geopolitical antagonisms, saw neither war nor peace. While
genuine peace, in the sense of the relatively predictable absence of
war or threats of war, proved impossible, actual outbreaks of war,
u n c i v i l wa r s 111
even in limited domains, were checked by the serious risks of escala-

tion and of mutual nuclear annihilation; or, to use Raymond Aron’s
succinct formulation, the Cold War made ‘peace impossible, war
unlikely’.2
By contrast, the crumbling of the Soviet empire and of global
East–West confrontations has accelerated the triangulation of violence
mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Although it seemed for a
time that the end of superpower confrontations would make a Third
World War and wars in general rather improbable, in fact localised
wars became more prevalent – and more ferocious. If, during the Cold
War, the maxim ‘neither war nor peace’ held sway, then the formula
for the post-Cold War period, as Pierre Hassner has put it, is ‘both
war and peace’.3 Symptomatic of this enigmatic trend towards uncivil
wars and triangulated violence were the garbled developments within
Europe itself: while its western regions engaged in a path-breaking
politics of integration of territorial states aimed at putting an end to
war, a few hundred kilometres to the south-east a bloody conflict with
hundreds of thousands of casualties raged.
In the era of triangulated violence, in which both war and peace
flourish, bloodshed caused by local wars is widespread. In 1964, it has
been estimated that there were active resistance movements within
less than a dozen countries – Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus,
Guatemala, Laos, New Guinea, Republic of South Africa, Vietnam
and Yemen – whereas today the number of such conflicts, according
to reliable recent UN estimates, has risen some seven times, which
represents nine-tenths of all large-scale armed conflicts around the
world.
But not only are local wars on the increase. In some places,
their form and content have gone in directions that are not grasped
2
The formulation first appeared in Raymond Aron’s Le grand schisme (Paris 1948) and
was reiterated, shortly before Aron’s death, in Les dernières annels du siècIe (Paris
1984).
3
Pierre Hassner, ‘La guerre et la paix’, in La violence et la paix. De la bombe atomique
au nettoyage ethnique (Paris 1995), pp. 23–61.
by conventional analyses of so-called civil war. In order to clarify

this point, some further reflection on the conventional understand-
ing of ‘civil war’ is necessary. According to the standard social science
approach, civil war is violent conflict within a society resulting from
attempts to seize or maintain state power and its symbols of legit-
imacy by extralegal, violent means.4 Civil war is a violent form of
horizontal conflict with vertical aims. It is said to be ‘civil’ because
civilians are engaged in it. It is said to be ‘war’ because violence is
applied by all parties to the conflict. Typically, it is explained, civil war
is triggered by the absence of effective formal and informal channels
for resolving certain social and political grievances. The consequent
sense of frustration, or futility, or fear of reprisals among sections of
the population encourage all parties to embrace the assumption or
conviction that violence is necessary. There then follows a carefully
planned and executed struggle to seize the means of state power by
using rational-calculating violent methods.
It is explained that there are usually three phases in any civil
war. Phase one sees the building of the structures of a resistance move-
ment, especially order-giving, message-receiving networks. During
phase two, the protagonists of civil war directly apply violence against
their enemies. Their sabotage, underground and guerrilla units apply
terror at intervals, selectively hitting the brain and nervous system
of the enemy power structure – the ruling elites, the communication
and transportation centres and the most strategically sensitive indus-
tries. The final phase of civil war, when the outcome of the conflict is
decided, is that of insurrection, in which the conflict explodes into the
open, with coordinated uprisings in various parts of the country. There
4
The various works by J. K. Zawodny on ‘unconventional warfare’ well illustrate
this approach. See, for example, his two-volume Men and International Relations:
Contributions of the Social Sciences to the Study of Conflict and Integration (San
Francisco, CA 1966); his essay, ‘Unconventional warfare’, American Scholar, 31
(1962), pp. 384–94; and his edited collection, Unconventional Warfare, in Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 341 (Philadelphia 1962).
are probes by the resistance movement to obtain control of either the

capital or strategic parts of the country in order to establish some sort
of legitimate counter-government which can act openly on behalf of
the organisation. This stage is critical, since it compels the resistance
to emerge on the streets and to fight until it wins, or is destroyed.
At this point, the insurgents act in large units, and street fighting is
conducted according to the rules of infantry tactics. The insurgents’
objective is a series of uprisings, spreading like brushfire, intended to
destroy the enemy’s formal power structure and machinery of violence
throughout the whole territory. At some point, the conflict comes to
an end, and the civil war normally may be said to have ceased when
either one faction forcibly subjugates its opponent (as in the American
Civil War), or the warring parties establish their independence from
each other (as in the civil war that led to the separation of Belgium
and Holland), or, mutually exhausted and weakened, the protagonists
arrange an at least temporary truce (as in the Wars of Roses).
The orthodox literature on civil war is admittedly summarised
here in the briefest terms, but I have done so in order to highlight its
inability to grasp the ways in which ‘civil war’ can easily become, and
today often is, a euphemism for the most terrible experience of death
and destruction. Orthodox commentators have often failed to ques-
tion the assumption that civil war by definition must take place at the
level of the nation-state. They have not asked whether the concept of
a ‘civil war’ can be extended ‘downwards’ to the sub-state, or ‘micro-
level’. What is also striking – to extend an insight of Hobbes – is that
so few theorists have enquired whether or to what extent the com-
batants’ violent struggle during a so-called civil war can degenerate
into a conflagration in which, in violation of the old moral precepts of
rationally calculated ‘just war’, the means of violence appear to take
on a life of their own and violence consequently becomes an end in
itself.
Some of these possibilities have been explored fruitfully in the
writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Robert Kaplan, Martin van
Creveld and others,5 according to whom the end of the Cold War has
hastened the decay of conventional armies and the classificatory grid
of territorial states. Our era sees the plunge towards what Kaplan calls
‘a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anar-
chic regionalisms’. The heartlands of Europe and other metropolitan
regions fall under the shadow of ‘low-intensity conflict’ (van Creveld),
or what Enzensberger calls ‘molecular civil war’ (molekularer
Bürgerkrieg). This local violence in Solingen, Tower Hamlets, Val–
Fourré, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Marseilles disturbingly par-
allels the large-scale wars of the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia and
Latin America. Every carriage on a city’s underground, says Enzens-
berger, can become a miniature Bosnia. To that observation could
be added other examples; for instance, the shanty towns of Rio de
Janeiro’s Death Triangle, where drug barons and their gunmen impose
curfews, decide when people come and go, who lives and who dies,
and generally determine who gets what, when; and violent places like
Route 66, a stretch of highway winding from Monticello, Utah, to
Gallup, New Mexico, which was bedevilled some years ago by hit-
and-run killings, body dumpings and a crazed killer named the Mad
Trucker, whom local police suspected ran people over for sport.
When they unfold on a large scale, such conflicts are not
understandable through conventional categories like class struggle,
youth revolt or national liberation. It would also be a scandalous
euphemism to call them civil wars. While conventionally organised
bloody civil wars no doubt persist, at least some of today’s battle
zones are best described as a new type of conflict best called uncivil
war. These wars display disturbingly new common characteristics.
Most striking is the way in which the protagonists of violence prac-
tise asymmetric violence. They outwit top-heavy, clumsy and expen-
sively equipped conventional armies by wielding their own reasonably
5
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt am Main
1993); Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York and Toronto 1991),
especially pp. 1–32, 192–227; Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The coming anarchy’, The Atlantic
Monthly, 273, 2 (February 1994), pp. 44–76.
sophisticated means of violence according to no rules except that of

destructiveness – of people, property, the infrastructure, places of his-
torical importance and even nature itself. Previous civil wars were
undoubtedly bloody. But the blood that was spilled nearly always had
an organised and self-disciplined form, as Trotsky, the architect of vic-
tory in a civil war in which 9 million people died, recognised when
likening Soviet power to organised civil war against the landlords,
bourgeoisie and kulaks. Some of today’s conflicts appear to lack any
logic or structure, except that of murder on an unlimited scale. It is
therefore tempting to describe the hyper-destructiveness of these bat-
tle zones as a late modern regression into ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ war-
fare. Kaplan speaks of the emergence of ‘re-primitivized man: warrior
societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and
planetary overcrowding’. The emerging patterns of violence, predicts
van Creveld, ‘will have more in common with the struggles of primi-
tive tribes than with large-scale conventional war’.
The temptation to think of contemporary uncivil wars as ‘prim-
itive’ is itself primitive. It should be resisted, because there is much
anthropological evidence that wars among hunting and gathering soci-
eties had an entirely different logic. In stateless, egalitarian Muslim
desert tribes, for example, order among the various horizontally
arranged and vertically nested segmentary groups was maintained
without political centralisation by the cohesion-producing effects of
permanent feuding at all levels, a pattern expressed in the maxim,
‘I against my brothers, my brothers and I against our cousins, my
brothers, cousins and I against the world.’6 In his reflections upon
Amerindian societies, Pierre Clastres interpreted the chronic violence
among these societies as a reflexive means of guaranteeing their mem-
bers’ autonomy and preventing the emergence of oppressive state
institutions. ‘Primitive society is society against the State insofar as
it is society mobilised for war’, he observed, adding the surprising
observation that tribal chieftains, who do not exercise power as we
6
Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge 1981), pp. 36–69.
moderns know it, were themselves prevented from exploiting war as

a means of empowerment because they were engaged in a journey
bound ultimately to end in death. ‘Each feat of arms hailed and cel-
ebrated by the tribe in fact obligates him to aim higher’, until the
point is reached where, ‘realizing the supreme exploit, he thereby
obtains, with absolute glory, death.’ The practice of sending lone war-
riors abroad to attack the enemy camp and to die like a sacred king,
‘alone against all’, mirrors in inverted form this same principle of ‘all
against one’; so too does the strange practice of temporarily integrat-
ing prisoners-of-war into society, giving them wives, treating them
royally, until the day they are ritually sacrificed and eaten by their
captors.7
Parallel but substantively different rules for apportioning vio-
lence in war have been a persistent feature of political thought and
practice well into modern times. A wise prince, commented Machi-
avelli, knows that although ‘he will often be necessitated’ to act ‘con-
trary to truth, contrary to charity, contrary to humanity, contrary to
religion’, the maintenance of his government, even in war, requires
him to observe ‘what is right when he can’.8 ‘Before undertaking war’,
wrote Johannes Althusius, ‘a magistrate should first check his own
judgement and reasoning, and offer prayers to God to arouse and direct
the spirit and mind of his subjects and himself to the well-being, util-
ity, and necessity of the church and community, and to avoid all rash-
ness and injustice.’9 Even Clausewitz offered a secular version of the
same argument by advising caution in wielding violence under certain
7
Pierre Clastres, Recherches d’anthropologie politique (Paris 1980), pp. 206, 232, 237,
234. See also Alfred Adler, ‘La guerre et l’État primitif’, in Miguel Abensour (ed.),
L’esprit des lois sauvages. Pierre Clastres ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique
(Paris 1987), pp. 98–9, 111–12.
8
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in A. Gilbert (trans.), Machiavelli. The Chief Works
and Others, 3 vols (Durham, NC 1965), vol. I, p. 66.
9
Johannes Althusius, Politica Methodice digesta atque exemplis sacris et profanis
ilustrata (Herborn 1603), ed. and trans, and with an introduction by Frederick S.
Carney as Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane
Examples (Indianapolis 1995), ch. 35, sect. 10, p. 188.
conditions; of special importance for him was the need to observe the
primacy of ‘moral forces’ and ‘the intelligence of the personified state’
over the violence of war.
In at least some of today’s uncivil wars, large and small, all these
sober restrictions covering the ground rules of war are swept aside.
Alibis abound, to be sure, but the law of battle is straightforward:
kill, rape, pillage, burn, destroy everything that moves, breathes or
twitches. Emblematic of this violence without structure and limits –
of pure violence operating as both means and end – are grisly inner
urban disputes. Youths are stabbed to death in a row over drugs. A cou-
ple is murdered, then dismembered. Unidentified victims are dowsed
in petrol and set on fire. In uncivil wars, analogously, the summary
murder and counter-murder of innocents takes place on a large scale.
The systematic hunting down and massacre of people like animals
in Rwanda by killers who had emptied their heads and hearts of all
thought and all heart-felt morals typify this trend. The Rwandan case
shows that when everything is up for grabs, uncivil wars can ulti-
mately degenerate into genocide – organised violence that deliberately
aims physically to annihilate a targeted group. For this to happen,
uncivil violence must be well organised. It must have access to the
organisational means of killing people in large numbers (thankfully,
this condition is sometimes undermined by the sheer recklessness
of uncivil war). It was not because of its ‘primitiveness’ or ‘back-
wardness’ that the Rwandan people – both Tutsi and opposition Hutu
– suffered genocide. Their fate, on the contrary, was helped by the
technical preconditions of unlimited murder: a well-organised civil
service, a small, tightly controlled land area, reasonably good commu-
nications and a self-disciplined population capable under pressure of
forgetting the meaning of civility.10 Given these conditions, the thorns
of incivility spread on a frightful scale. A survivor of the Interahamwe
recalled:
10
Gérard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis. History of a Genocide (London 1998).
Then at about 10.00 a.m. the killing began, with machetes and
masus . . . The whole place was completely surrounded, the
church, the hospital, the trading centre. No-one could escape. If
people fled in a group, they threw a grenade at them. Then they
searched the dead bodies for money. I survived a grenade attack.
I fell though I was not wounded. I hid in a corner. My husband
had already been killed . . . At about 2.00 p.m. the attackers left
to attack the trading centre. The dead bodies were just too many.
The place was red. Blood was flowing like water. I could see
babies suckling the breasts of their dead mothers.11
What kind of people can engage in unrestrained killing of this

kind? Uncivil violence seems to feed upon characters without charac-
ter. The violent have to be capable of denying – even in the face of the
starkest evidence – that violence is taking place. Armed with AK-47
assault rifles, or grenades or machetes or just their bare hands, they
exude all the symptoms of what Hannah Arendt called a radical loss of
self. Purged of religious faith and moral scruples, they certainly lack
idealism. They are banal creatures. Like graffiti on urban walls, their
acts of violence are random and usually mindless. They will serve
anybody, betray anybody, do anything to save their skins. The killers’
faces are blank, their words are cynical. Some of them are rendered
decorticate by drugs. ‘I don’t think about it’, they say. ‘All I know is
that they are shit’, or ‘Either you kill or get killed’, they add. Such
remarks, familiar to journalists, who commonly have guns waved
in their faces, reveal the striking degree to which today’s guerrillas
are autistic. Unlike the murderous followers of Mussolini, Stalin or
Hitler, today’s fighters – skinheads who mindlessly firebomb refugee
homes, for example – act as if they are characters in a Céline novel.
They are often no-hopers who believe in nothing but their own private
fantasies. Like the Tiger paramilitaries in Serbia led by the ex-bank
11
Testimony by Clementina Murorunkwere, 13 June 1994, reprinted in the African
Rights report, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (London 1994), p. 258.
robber Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnjatović, their senses are attuned only to

violence and, not surprisingly, they are forced to take leave of sense
itself. Unafraid of being shot or injured, they are self-destructive gang-
sters driven by ‘anger at anything undamaged’ (Enzensberger). If guilt
presupposes a clear understanding of what one is doing at the time of
a crime, then the violent are best described as innocent murderers.
Today’s uncivil wars tend to produce chaos in their wake.
They vandalise the threefold division of government, army and
civilians once enforced by conventional warfare and the West-
phalian and Philadelphian models. Today’s uncivil wars ransack the
legal monopoly of armed force long claimed by states. They de-
professionalise violence (by dissolving ‘soldiers’ and ‘rebels’ into
‘sobels’, as the gunmen were called in Sierra Leone) and put an end to
the distinction between war and crime. They ensure that conflict
degenerates into ‘criminal anarchy’ (Kaplan), into deathly destruction
and self-destruction that has terrible symbols: the conspicuous poi-
soning and torching of food by Renamo fighters in a country wracked
by famine; the Serbian gunmen who boasted in front of reporters
that they felt nothing but pride after massacring every patient in one
hospital, and then smashing up its equipment; and in Rwanda the
widespread sexual abuse and murder of women, even the disembow-
elling of pregnant women, the public display of their foetuses, their
killers shouting to husbands and bystanders words like: ‘Here! Eat
your bastards!’
Waste lands
It is important to try to be clear about the self-destructiveness of the
perpetrators of bloody violence – about the ways in which their absurd
ventures into the land of violence effectively call into question both
the efficacy and the legitimacy of violence as a weapon in power strug-
gles, at least on this scale. Uncivil wars not only take away life in the
present, they have life-threatening effects for both those who outlive
the conflict and those who are yet to be born. Uncivil wars rule from
the grave. Uncivil wars threaten the pact, emphasised by Edmund
Burke, between the dead, the living and the unborn, and they therefore
destroy the future possibility of a civil society protected by democratic
government. This is true in several ways.
War has often been described as good for business, and there is
no doubt that war profiteering remains a chronic feature of armed con-
flicts around the world – the octopus-like arms trade being the apogee
of the whole business. Yet there is a long tradition of modern argu-
ment, stretching back well into the eighteenth century, that insists
that war is often bad for business, that violence produces decadent
forms of investment, and that war tends to destroy the infrastructure
of market economies, including the civility that is a basic prerequi-
site of commodity production and exchange. ‘I must confess’, wrote
David Hume, ‘when I see princes and states fighting and quarrelling,
amidst their debts, funds, and public mortgages, it always brings to
my mind a match of cudgel-playing fought in a China shop.’12 This
old thesis that stagnation or pauperisation is the offspring of incivility
arguably remains pertinent in the face of all-out uncivil war, which
undoubtedly diverts resources into unproductive, mafia-type activi-
ties like corruption and criminality. These in turn weaken or wreck
the possibility of developing or sustaining a dynamic economy that
can enable ‘taxation states’ to form, and civilians to live well.
The economic pillaging of war-torn uncivil societies like Sierra
Leone, Lebanon and Algeria not only serves as a reminder that mar-
kets function well only when they are embedded within a robust
civil society. The inverse rule applies with a vengeance. Uncivil war
perversely highlights the point that where there is no civil soci-
ety there cannot be markets, exactly because market economies are
directly dependent upon a dense and delicate forest of non-violent civil
institutions, whose contingent patterns of social solidarity, norms of
reciprocity and civic engagement are vital for ensuring flows of infor-
mation about technological developments; a general awareness of the
12
David Hume, ‘Of public credit’, in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H.
Green and T. H. Grose (London 1898), p. 396.
credit-worthiness of would-be entrepreneurs; the dampening of get-

rich-quick forms of opportunism; and, through the informal social
interactions hosted by cafés, bars, clubs and streets, the cultivation of
workers’ motivation, reliability and sense of dignity.13
Uncivil wars, the most extreme form of incivility, also have
long-term destructive effects upon the ecosystem in which battles
rage. T. S. Eliot’s premonition (in The Waste Land) of an ultimate war
where ‘the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief and the
dry stone no sound of water’ is no longer mere fantasy. Whether in
Kabul or Vukovar or Grozny or Sarajevo, uncivil war leaves behind a
trail of ravaged buildings, whole fields of oil-stained earth and piles
of toxic rubble where no flowers or trees grow, and where tired, ill-
looking men and women bury their dead, leaving the young to grub
around in the ruins, in search of firewood, flour, nettles, lizards, and
edible grass. The ecological damage caused by uncivil war seems to
be unaffected by the degree to which fighting is conducted by ‘high-
tech’ or ‘low-tech’ methods. Ecological damage is of course a chronic
feature of high-technology battle, as in the 1991 Gulf War, in which
the American-led coalition bombing of oil wells and tankers in Iraq
and Kuwait, and Iraq’s torching of oil wells and dumping of oil into
the ocean, left the Persian Gulf area covered for weeks in sulphurous
black smoke and permanently polluted from biochemical weapons
spillages, oil leaks and oil well fires that took many months to extin-
guish. Many so-called ‘low-intensity conflicts’ are long-running wars
that produce similar effects. The violence at the famous nineteenth-
century battle of Solferino lasted one whole day. Uncivil war in Angola
lasted three decades; the violence in Afghanistan has been going on
for just as long. Little wonder that these conflicts turn entire regions
or whole countries into theatres of war that not only destroy civilians
but do long-term ecological damage, helped along (as in the widespread
dumping of toxic wastes in Lebanon) by organised crime desperate to
13
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(Princeton 1993), pp. 152–62.
profit from the general unaccountability of power and the breakdown

of law and order.
Uncivil wars also do long-term damage to the ecology of human
personality. Since uncivil wars threaten individuals with death, they
breed fear. Every living creature is drawn into a permanent state of
emergency. The conflict resembles a free-fire zone, a killing ground,
in which everything that moves, or impedes free movement, is shot
at. Hobbes, who recognised the fundamental importance of fear as a
political factor, supposed that during intense experiences of violence
individuals ridden with fear would come to their senses. They would
vote rationally for a peace contract – as if conquering fear were merely
a matter of mind over body. In practice, things are never so simple.
The fear produced by uncivil wars can have a warning and mobilising
function. It can lift aloft those who fight, or are trapped by fighting.
It can enable them to survive, even to act as they never thought they
could. Fear can even produce a ‘craving for the extraordinary’, as Ernst
Jünger called the bizarre patterns of reckless solidarity among World
War I soldiers hell-bent on destroying the cathedrals at Rheims and
Albert, and who thought nothing of attacking even Notre Dame from
the air.14 We have heard much of war ‘heroism’ of this kind but, begin-
ning with Hobbes, we have heard much less of the paralysing and
sometimes auto-destructive effects of the fear induced by violence
upon individuals. Edmund Burke’s reply to Hobbes remains salient:
episodes of prolonged violence ‘strike deepest of all into the manners
of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals;
they pervert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice.’15
For every epiphany produced by uncivil war there is at least
the same quantity of psychosomatic wreckage. Fear generated by war
is profoundly anti-democratic. Violence eats the souls of civilians. It
erodes or destroys their capacity to make judgements and to act in
14
Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Berlin 1929), pp. 114–15.
15
Edmund Burke, A Letter to John Farr and John Harris, Esqrs., Sheriffs of the City of
Bristol, on the Affairs of America (1777), p. 203.
solidarity with, and against, other civilians. The violated are afraid of
being frightened. They are gripped with fear of ceasing to be them-
selves. They experience nightmares in a void. Words often fail them,
or burn their mouths when they try to speak about their plight. The
afraid are haunted by the ghosts of violence, which appear and reap-
pear as extreme trauma syndromes, or as sickening fears of perma-
nent disablement or probable death (as in the so-called ‘Gulf War Syn-
drome’ of weight loss, chronic allergies, seizures and cancers that may
have been triggered by the cocktails of vaccinations and anti-nerve
gas drugs issued to troops subsequently engaged in Operation Desert
Storm). Then there are the long-term inner fears that trouble the indi-
vidual on a random basis. There is a big body of literature describing
the low self-esteem, the self-destructiveness caused by humiliation,
and willingness to project violence onto others, of many children who
have witnessed violence or who have been beaten during childhood.
It is also well known that women who have been raped, or men who
have been attacked and robbed on the street, suffer occasional night-
mares or daytime fits of panic, or uncontrolled weeping. During and
after uncivil war, such symptoms are experienced far more intensely
and for longer periods, certainly well after the objective conditions
of violence have disappeared. If and when peace comes, individuals
carry uncivil war within them. They experience no joy in ‘victory’ or
‘peace’.
Clinical evidence from the war in Bosnia, although still impres-
sionistic, documents some of these effects, some of which are some-
times enigmatic, including many cases of women who have been
raped, but who – it sounds unbelievable at first – sometimes find
that fact among the most understandable and therefore least trou-
bling of their worries. These women are instead traumatised by their
separation from their children, deeply disturbed by witnessing their
husbands shot dead outside their homes, or shattered by the expe-
rience of queuing several hours for water, carrying buckets of it up
flights of stairs to their makeshift apartment in a bombed-out hotel –
only to fall victim to the snipers’ trick of waiting until the woman
arrives at her doorway before shooting a bullet straight through each of

her buckets, with flawless precision. Like survivors of holocausts, the
violated remain vulnerable to ‘deformations, dislocations, and imag-
inative impediments’ in the form of psychic numbing; they suffer
guilt generated by the escape from death’s clutches, and a fragmen-
tary understanding of the hard-won experience of death.16 The brush
with violent death immobilises them. They are forced to struggle, joy-
lessly, against their own confusions and traumas, their half-articulate,
disordered experience of the present, unaided by their damaged expec-
tations of the future, if they are blessed with any.
Landmines
Uncivil strife normally leaves in its trail another deadly legacy: whole
populations and vast tracts of land saturated with unused or unex-
ploded weapons that can prove to be far greater killers in times of peace
than in times of war. Uncivil wars dissolve the distinction between
war and peace; peace becomes smouldering war, full of daily reminders
of the persistence of violence. Unexploded mines are a symbol of this
persistence of violence long after formal agreements to stop it have
been made.17
A gift of the twentieth century to posterity, landmines are of
course not new. Designed as a response to the tank during World War I,
they were used extensively in World War II, especially in Russia and
Poland. Yet these landmines were large and heavy objects. They were
time-consuming to lay, easily detectable and used mainly against spe-
cific military targets. Mines were designed to maim or kill enemy
troops, to slow their movement, and to protect military installations,
troops, civilians and territory. During the 1960s, technical advances
made them smaller, lighter and cheaper – the popular P4 MK2 weighs
16
Robert Jay Lifton, The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age
(New York 1987), p. 24.
17
The following draws upon the well-documented reports provided by the Arms
Project of Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, Landmines.
A Deadly Legacy (New York, Washington, Los Angeles, London 1993) and
http://www.icbl.org
less than 3 ounces and costs only a few American dollars. That fact,
combined with their delayed-action potential, fostered the perception
that they could be used offensively, as inexpensive and efficient means
of controlling the movement of populations, terrorising them, empty-
ing the countryside, creating refugee flows and literally crippling the
opposing forces. What took a World War II battalion all day to put in
place now took a matter of minutes. Laos and Cambodia saw the first
large-scale attempts to scatter mines at random; by 1979, when the
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, landmines had become a standard
offensive weapon, distributed as ‘scatterables’ with ease over wide
areas by artillery, rocket or plane.
Mines soon became big business. While accurate figures remain
difficult to obtain, by the mid-1990s there were some 50 different
models, manufactured by around 100 companies in at least 48 differ-
ent countries; the principal producers and exporters were the United
States, Italy, Germany, China, Egypt, Singapore, and Pakistan. The
consequent ease with which landmines could be procured, especially
by cash-starved armies, made their use a standard feature of uncivil
wars, with macabre consequences. In Kurdistan, more than half of the
total expenditure on health still goes on treating and caring for the
victims of mines. In Cambodia, there are reportedly more than 30,000
amputees in a population of 8 million. As elsewhere, more than half
of the victims are boys and girls blown up while engaged in the rural
tasks they have always performed – taking flocks to graze pastures,
collecting water and firewood – or while playing. In the early days
of the war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, playful children, before
they knew better, were even attracted to the small, brightly painted,
air-delivered mines, nicknamed ‘butterflies’ or ‘green parrots’. Dur-
ing the 1990s, before the American overthrow of the Taliban govern-
ment, an estimated 10 million unexploded mines littered the country,
destroying a good part of its irrigation system and, consequently, the
population’s self-sufficiency in food. In Angola, where uncivil war
raged for more than three decades, famine spread through districts
too heavily mined to be cultivated. And in war-ravaged Mozambique,
repeated mining and counter-mining by both Frelimo government

and Renamo forces paralysed transport systems, permanently severed
the country’s electricity power supplies, forcibly prevented more than
2 million refugees from returning to their homes, and destroyed the
tourist industry by killing large numbers of elephants and other wild
life in the contaminated game parks.
Landmines kill and maim citizens. They also choke off the pos-
sible future growth of a civil society with a good measure of civil-
ity. Landmines can lie dormant for up to two or three decades before
being detonated by a child at play, an elderly civilian strolling at dusk
or a household pig fattening itself on local fields. The wounds they
inflict are ruinous. The shock wave from an exploding landmine often
destroys blood vessels well up the leg, forcing surgeons to amputate
much higher than the site of the primary wound. Landmines also
cause secondary infections by driving dirt, clothing, bacteria, metal
and plastic fragments into the body’s tissues. Survivors of mine explo-
sions suffer intense physical pain. Their livelihoods are frequently
lost. Households are confronted with severe financial stress caused
by the substantial costs of treatment and rehabilitation, loss of the
victim’s earnings, and the long-term costs of supporting an unproduc-
tive relative. In areas prickling with mines, especially in rural areas,
citizens must either learn to live with mines, working their fields as
best they can, risking death each day, or abandon their homes to live
safely elsewhere, thereby depopulating the local area and weakening
the basis of social solidarity.
Clearing mines is no easy job. Landmines may come cheap, but
their average cost of safe removal is somewhere between $300 and
$1,000 each – a ratio frightening in its implications for a world in
which per capita income is often less than that, and in which there
are roughly 100 million uncleared mines, and in which mines are still
being laid worldwide far faster than they are being removed. The effec-
tive banning of their production, export, stockpiling and deployment
is nowhere in sight – a depressing symptom of which is the UN’s
Landmines Protocol of 1983, which feebly attempted to regulate their
use, but not production or sale. Although the provisions of the most
recent anti-landmine treaty convention (1997) are intended to dimin-
ish landmine use against civilians, it contains no effective enforce-
ment mechanisms and ignores the fundamental problem of temporal
randomness inherent in mine warfare: the way in which mines effec-
tively outlast their military utility and place civilians at risk, typi-
cally on a long-term basis. In the meantime, mine clearance remains
a primitive process, with no ‘silver bullets’ in sight. Paradoxically,
sophisticated anti-handling devices, often with electronic sensors or
microchips, increase the risk to de-miners. ‘Most mine-clearing tools
are glorified farm implements’, observes The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, and ‘a man with a stick is still the most common instru-
ment’.18 Needless to say, the hand removal of mines is dangerous and
time-consuming, especially given that the people doing it have little
idea of the type or location of the mines. The strong political temp-
tation, especially in regions exhausted by war, is therefore to forget
the whole dirty business – and violently to suffer its consequences in
so-called peacetime.
18
Jim Wurst, ‘Ten million tragedies, one step at a time’, The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists (July/August 1993), p. 20.
Ethics
If you are not prepared to take life,

you must often be prepared for lives
to be lost in some other way.
George Orwell (1949)
social pacification
Is it ever justified to use violence to prevent or to reduce violence? Are
there circumstances in which the creation, or defence, of democracy
should be attempted by violent means? More generally, is it plausible
to speak of a democratic ethic of violence?
Such questions are back on the political agenda, in no small
measure because even though all wars are nasty, some wars – uncivil
wars like those in southern Sudan and Chechenya, Liberia and the
Lebanon – have proved to be nastier than most. Marked by reckless
and random killing without either mercy or ruth, they produce a trail
of destructive effects that ripple through the wider world. Uncivil wars
show just how easily collective strife can erupt in otherwise peaceful
and vibrant societies with an impressive history of viable pluralism;
and how this strife can degenerate into a random and reckless violence
that has a logic all of its own. And – the darkest point of all – uncivil
wars show how difficult it is to define and master the arts of social
pacification and democracy-building once the unrestricted killing of
anybody who can be harmed and killed has broken out.
If uncivil wars were confined to specific zones of the earth, away
from the hubs and spokes of the globalising world as we know it, they
would be of marginal interest to most people. But uncivil wars are not
like that. They are not easily contained within geographic bounds.
Uncivil wars are hunting and training grounds for gun-runners, merce-
naries, profiteers and terrorists who operate on a global scale. Refugees
stream from their infected battle zones; businesses disinvest from
their wrecked economies; other non-governmental organisations are
e t h i c s 129
also forced to escape their clutches. Re-presented to global audiences

by news media 24 hours a day, all these effects help to explain why only
the blind, or callous, or foolish still regard them as far-away conflicts
in far-away lands; and why military (‘humanitarian’) intervention and
(hence) post-war reconstruction have become chronic global problems
of our time.
Intervention and post-war reconstruction are also now among
the top items of the global political agenda, thanks to the latest fash-
ions in military strategy. For the time being, the dominant pattern
of foreign interventions has been set. Those carried out by American
forces in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Kosovo resemble hit-and-run
affairs. Like a metal hammer that pounds a wooden stake into the
earth, their aim is to beat the enemy into submission, in the expec-
tation that the earthly elements of time will dissolve the animosity
that originally nurtured the local conflict. Such intervention bears
a strange resemblance to nomads’ strikes against their adversaries.
Armed to the teeth, the attackers travel light; they rely on their ability
to swoop down on their victims, using weapons like stealth bombers
and cruise missiles – the contemporary equivalent of nineteenth-
century gunboats – to inflict the maximum harm, then to retreat,
all the while supposing that the violated will not or cannot retaliate.
Measured in terms of the power to build democratic institu-
tions and peaceful ways of life, this American-style or Washington-
backed strategy of quick intervention is deeply flawed. With the
outbreak of ‘peace’, US troops in Baghdad found themselves forced
to conduct high-alert patrols through the streets dressed in full com-
bat gear, pistols in hand. Every short-term occupier was potentially
a target, including the young American military officers – in the
absence of broad global support for the invasion – who had been left
to organise schools, purify drinking water, repair power plants and
pick up the rubbish, often without knowing what they were doing.
On democratic grounds, American-style military intervention is also
easy to shame. The disproportion between military casualties and the
violence heaped upon civilians is staggering; so high are the levels
of protection of the invading armies that their violence is felt by

observers and victims alike to have a terrorist quality about it.
There is another difficulty: the power to force others into sub-
mission does not translate spontaneously into the power of the sur-
vivors to form stable democratic governments and law-enforced civil
societies. The psychic traumas, damaged tissues of sociability and eco-
logical and infrastructural damage inflicted by both the war of inter-
vention and all the senseless sanctification of cruelty that came before
it are left untreated. In some quarters of the victors’ camp, nobody
gives a damn about that; when the job is done, the vanquished are
tacitly written off (as Kipling once put it) as ‘lesser breeds without the
Law’. From the standpoint of the survivors on the ground, however,
things look rather different. In the aftermath of uncivil war and outside
military intervention, it is as if the worldly power to act stops flow-
ing through people’s veins. The content of their worlds disintegrates.
People feel numbed. They suffer muted anguish and pain. Reckless,
indiscriminate killing saps people’s trust in themselves and others; it
mutilates their capacity for self-organisation; it frustrates their abil-
ity to make short-term decisions and long-term plans through house-
holds, partnerships, neighbourhoods and other social associations and
networks.
Efforts to build or re-build civil society out of the ruins of war
start from this point. So also do the difficulties. The crafting of peace-
ful social relations is undoubtedly an essential antidote to the ruins
left behind by uncivil war. Yet talk of the need for a civil society is
no all-purpose magic wand. New constitutions and some rudiments
of government can be created within a few months. Standing armies
take longer to form, perhaps two or three years, but not quite as long
as viable market institutions, which take at least a decade. The most
arduous task, which can take many decades, is the creation of other
trust-producing civil society institutions, like professional associa-
tions, trades unions, neighbourhood organisations and self-help and
civil liberties networks – none of which resemble naturally occurring
substances. The delicate resource called civility cannot be agreed and
e t h i c s 131
written by means of round-table meetings, constitutional conven-

tions, truth commissions or covenants (like the 1989 Ta’if Accord that
is credited with marking the rebirth of the Lebanese republic). Civil-
ity can neither be planned nor legislated from above, nor produced
through rational agreement and public controversy. Nor can it be pro-
duced like pizzas and fast foods, or like automobiles or microchips,
on assembly lines. It takes time to grow.
Like other democratic mechanisms, the institutional rules and
organisations of a civil society are deeply contingent. They presup-
pose the emotional willingness of actors to get involved with others,
to talk with them, to form groups, to change or pluralise their loyal-
ties. Especially in a civil society, the propensity of women and men to
associate freely and to interact fearlessly with others is not (and should
not be) linked to any one particular identity or group, whether based
on blood, geography, class, tradition or religion. Contrary to Marx and
others, the middle classes are not the ‘natural’ carriers of the senti-
ments of civil society. Pacification, ending the pathos of uncivil war,
requires that support and encouragement must be given to any group
or project capable of engendering the spirit of pluralism and free asso-
ciation. Civil sentiments best hatch and grow in compact milieux like
urban areas, through a variety of apparently ‘non-political’ strategies:
architectural design and landscaping schemes; local health and envi-
ronmental and archaeological programmes; and through a whole range
of cultural initiatives, from the performing arts to competitive sports
and university seminars. The qualities produced by such initiatives
can never be the offspring of ideological groups, movements and par-
ties driven by nationalism or xenophobic racism or re-tribalisation.
A civil society rather supposes that women and men can be maver-
icks – makari1 – who can live with a variety of others in complex
1
Through a striking and hopeful image, Samir Khalaf’s account of the difficulties of
regenerating civil society institutions (Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (New
York 2002) p. 323) points to the metaphorical importance of the traditional figure of
the Lebanese makari, the wandering peddler known locally for the tales and tidbits
that he brings back from the wider world.
ways. It demands, in other words, that they can control their venge-
ful impulses, that they are capable of sociability and therefore have
in their hearts the ability to trust and be loyal to others – to be so
loyal, in fact, that they feel strong enough to stand up to others and
to organise against them.
Why are civil society institutions so difficult to build or rebuild
in the aftermath of uncivil war, we may ask? There are various reasons.
Business firms are often reluctant to play the role of economic wizards
by taking risks and investing in the social and economic infrastructure
wrecked by uncivil violence. When they do invest, quick profits often
result in kitsch. The Hard Rock Café and Pizza Hut nestle among
the public monuments, mosques and shops ruined by bazookas and
cluster bombs, but the resulting bourgeois culture of conspicuous con-
sumption is often paper thin. In the absence of genuine markets and
a vibrant middle class, business has no genuinely socialising effects.
It merely reinforces the public mood of lethargy and disengagement.
And when those requirements are satisfied, business investment often
tears at the shreds of the social fabric that somehow survived the cru-
elty of uncivil war. Fashionable hotels, luxury apartments and other
high-rise global hang-outs come to stand side-by-side with squalid
backyards and dilapidated homes; threatened by gentrification, poor
squatters are forced to defend their ground against rich speculators
and squads of police wielding truncheons, tear gas and water cannon,
or much more lethal weapons.
Meanwhile, in matters of post-war relief and rehabilitation, non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) can and do have mixed effects.
Compared with governments, NGOs are often flexible and innova-
tive, low cost and responsive to grass roots pressures. But their ‘civil-
ising’ effects do not happen spontaneously or automatically. For one
thing, the task of rebuilding a civil society from the ground upwards
is no substitute for the parallel task of building effective and legit-
imate governmental structures, which is why – as the fate of tiny
Lebanon in the hands of inter-Arab and superpower rivalries so tragi-
cally shows – relief and development work is frequently scuppered by
e t h i c s 133
local warlords and armed gangs, private armies and occupying forces.
The Washington-style invaders’ new method of minimising their own
casualties in part by using Gurkhas – native auxiliaries like the Alba-
nian Kosovo Liberation Army or the Afghan Northern Alliance – is
also no solution. It succours military force and warlords at the expense
of civilian government.
Then there are the socially distorting effects of NGO pro-
grammes. Observers usually pay too little attention to this, but a
careful examination of many post-war reconstruction efforts clearly
highlights another rule: to the extent that the sustained development
of civil society relies upon NGOs as conduits for aid money and tech-
nical support, it often turns them into hostages of fortune, with mixed
dividends. Donor funding can (but not always) overwhelm or distort
the goal of creating a civil society. It tends to create local organisa-
tions that are self-centred and blessed with power that is publicly
unaccountable, partly because they are so heavily dependent on their
donors; and partly because the staff of these NGOs (as the South
African joke has it) En-J-Oy all sorts of privileges otherwise denied
those living in misery around them.
triage?
Uncivil wars are the quintessence of incivility, and the mind-boggling
cruelty they produce highlights the clash between might and demo-
cratic right. Democracies (ideally conceived) are polities which culti-
vate a dynamic plurality of more or less equal forms of life that can be
held publicly accountable to others thanks to citizens’ access to insti-
tutions like independent communications media, periodic elections
and a vibrant civil society. Seen in this ‘ideal-typical’ way, democra-
cies dispense with First Principles. They cultivate a broad variety of
morals that in turn suppose and require citizens’ commitment to a
positive ethic: the mutual obligation to live and to let others live, to
regard them as equals, to cultivate institutions of civil society that are
protected and nurtured by publicly open and accountable government.
Democracy is the friend of multiple moralities. It stands for a universe
of freedom from a singular Universal Ethic. That is why democracy

requires individuals and groups to be civil: to live with moral ambiva-
lence, to practise moral judgements, to use such techniques as indi-
rection, face-saving and self-restraint in order to demonstrate their
commitment, in tactful speech and action and bodily manners, to the
worldly principle of a peaceful plurality of morals.
This democratic principle is not only a condition of possibil-
ity of freedom from all First Principles. It also implies opposition to
violence in all its forms. Violence robs both the violator and the vio-
lated of their freedom. It is antithetical to the ethic of plural morals.
Yet it is obvious that non-violent democracies without foundations
are vulnerable to forces – violent individuals, terrorist networks, bel-
licose gangs, well-trained armies – that want nothing of pluralism
and everything of their own particular way of life. When democra-
cies tolerate these intolerants they contradict and weaken their own
spirit of civility, which is why in certain contexts – uncivil war, for
instance – violence may be required to put an end to violence. Here
there are no hard-and-fast rules for spotting and dealing with the vio-
lent opponents of democracy. There is simply no substitute for the
task of making difficult political judgements in particular contexts.
Judgements naturally raise a fundamental strategic question: given
that violence threatens whole local populations and impacts nega-
tively upon democracies as we currently know them, can anything be
done to prevent or to stop it?
Some years ago, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany’s most
outspoken political essayist, responded provocatively to this ques-
tion with an answer that was as disturbing as it was modest: local
fire-fighting is the most that can be done and ought to be attempted.
Hic rhodus, hic salta! First things first. ‘No one would dispute that
universal solidarity is a noble goal. Those who are determined to
achieve it are to be admired’, wrote Enzensberger, who in the next
breath strongly criticised the cosmopolitan conviction – nowadays
associated with the kind of attitude to be found within the emer-
gent global civil society – that citizens and governments of the
e t h i c s 135
(formerly colonial) metropolitan countries have heaped so much vio-

lence on the rest of the world that they have a duty to remedy vio-
lence in far-off countries like Afghanistan, the Sudan and Chechenya.
In Enzensberger’s view, the belief that European omnipotence has
brought nothing but evil to the world is as suspect as the flip-side
conviction that omnipotent Europeans must now deliver good to the
world; or as monstrous as the UN Bosnia strategy of refusing to fight
the main aggressor, and preventing the victims from resisting, all the
while trying to protect them against total annihilation. Enzensberger’s
advice was blunt: abandon the pretentious and guilt-ridden nonsense
of universal ethics (‘the rhetoric of Universalism’) and work instead
for the practical removal of violence in places culturally and geograph-
ically close to home. The Germans, for instance,
cannot solve the situation in Kashmir; we understand little of the

conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites, between the Tamils
and the Sinhalese; whatever is to become of Angola must, in the
first instance, be decided by the Angolans. And before we get
trapped among warring Bosnians, we ought to mop up the civil
war in our own country. Our priority is not Somalia, but
Hoyerswerda and Rostock, Mölln and Sollingen.2
Enzensberger was probably right to insist that building more

civility into civil societies is an urgent and tangible goal of demo-
cratic politics. Yet his clear-headed iconoclasm was arguably marred
by some wild conclusions that today prompt a string of questions cen-
tral to any examination of the fate of democracies in a world of trian-
gulated violence: has traditional civil war actually disappeared from
the face of the earth? Is there remaining but a single continuum of
uncivil violence linking Rostock to Aceh? Did the Kurds who resisted
Saddam Hussein or the Palestinian suicide bombers who fought the
Israeli army all act like ‘autistic’ German skinheads or English football
2
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt am Main
1993), p. 90.
yobs on the rampage? If not – as seems probable – then surely violent

struggles against domination and genocide, as well as sustained efforts
to rebuild civility in former war zones, make sense? And since some
of these struggles – in South Africa, Bosnia and Burma, for instance –
have wider and sometimes direct implications for democratic coun-
tries and for global power politics, can the citizens and governments
of actually existing democracies simply turn their backs or shrug their
shoulders, muttering something about the need for first things first?
Isn’t the cultivation and defence of a global civil society backed by rep-
resentative government possible, and desirable? Or has the problem
of cruelty in fact ceased to be a global affair?
Enzensberger anticipated some of these challenging questions,
and tried to answer them through the argument that the general
containment and reduction of uncivil war is technically impossible,
especially in the aftermath of the Cold War. There is just too much
violence around to deal with it comprehensively. He mistakenly dis-
counted the possibility that will and force of circumstances might
propel the United States, the world’s policeman, into playing the role
of a global swing power that is capable of fighting against uncivil wars
on several fronts simultaneously.
Enzensberger also rejected the alternative ideal of a global civil
society and the complementary policy of building up the institutions
of the emerging cosmocracy, which would in turn require ‘that the
many sources of global or regional turbulences be dealt with in ways
that would minimize violent conflict among states, reduce injus-
tice among and within states, and prevent dangerous violations of
rights within them’.3 Enzensberger was aware that his own argument
was trapped potentially within a performative ethical contradiction
(how is it possible to advocate the reduction and tolerance of vio-
lence at the same time?), but he insisted that Gödel’s maxim that not
3
Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Delusions of world order’, New York Review of Books, 9 April
1992, p. 37. See my discussion of global civil society and cosmocracy in Global Civil
Society? (Cambridge and New York 2003).
e t h i c s 137
even mathematics can save itself from the quagmire of inconsistency

applies also to the problem of uncivil war. The selection of priorities
is necessary and inevitable. Where to begin? Where can I engage my
efforts most effectively? Which of these options should take prece-
dence? Such questions must be at the heart of governmental and mil-
itary and civil campaigns against incivility. Fantasies of omnipotence
among politicians, diplomats, generals and citizens should be aban-
doned. They should be replaced by the logic of triage: just as field
medicine first categorised the wounded into the three categories of
the slightly wounded, the terminally injured and the critically ill in
need of priority treatment, so today’s uncivil wars are not all remedi-
able. Some require light bandaging by outsiders. Others, the ones that
are incurable, have to be left to their own deathly fate; the remainder,
those with reasonable prospects of resolution, should preoccupy us.
Enzensberger’s case for political pragmatism, written as it is in
spare, angular prose full of ironic understatement, stands within the
modern tradition of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal for Prevent-
ing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to
their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Pub-
lick (1729). Since its publication in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, that tract has continuously fascinated and shocked its read-
ers with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the cruel pauperisation
of the Irish within the confines of the British Empire could be allevi-
ated by the farming of Irish babies for the metropolitan meat market.
In certain quarters, Enzensberger’s proposed strategy of triage evoked
similar shocked outrage, so confirming his reputation as a sagacious
provocateur who knows how to hit his readers where it hurts. That
hostile reaction may have been intended by Enzensberger. For as the
controversy whipped up in Germany by his earlier claim that Saddam
Hussein really was another Hitler shows, one of Enzensberger’s recent
preoccupations has been to question the dogmatic prejudice of both
naive pacifism and crude-minded militarism. As a political writer
who assigns a special role to irony in an age inclined to literalness,
he writes skilfully, in many voices. He is certainly no protagonist of
parochial apathy or self-exculpation. Nor can he be accused of condon-

ing war, either by neglect or by advocacy, or untoward comparisons. ‘It
glistens like the broken beer bottle in the sun/ at the bus-stop outside
the old people’s home’, he writes elliptically in a poem. War ‘rus-
tles like the manuscript of the ghostwriter at the peace conference./
It flickers like the blue reflection of the TV-set/ on somnambulist
faces.’4
Civil violence?
The spirit of Enzensberger’s reflections on violence arguably continue
where Brecht left off, not with his ideological (Marxian) certainties but
by using a poetic form of the strategy of Verfremdung, in which the
observable is poked and prodded and labelled with disturbing and con-
flicting understatements, always with a feel for the ‘torment of choos-
ing’ and awareness of the need for making judgements about what is
to be done. That emphasis on judgement indicates why Enzensberger
does not assume that his word is the last on the subject of violence,
and why further reflection on the same theme is not only warranted,
but required. There is certainly plenty of room, theoretically and polit-
ically, for contesting his claims, especially by widening the scope of
his concerns (as this essay on violence and democracy is attempting)
and by extending, sometimes to the limits, his rather vague proposals
for coming to terms with the problem of the destructiveness of uncivil
war.
From the perspective of democratic politics, Enzensberger’s
emphasis upon judgement is important. But while in a democracy
the recognition of complexities, dilemmas and aporia is indeed essen-
tial, Enzensberger’s defence of the principle of triage is only a begin-
ning. His essay gives voice to the working maxim so far adopted in
this essay: that involuntary death by violence is a scandalous vio-
lation of the ground rules of any civil society, especially one that
4
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Der Krieg, wie’, in Kiosk. Neue Gedichte (Frankfurt am
Main 1995), p. 8.
e t h i c s 139
enjoys a maximum of democratic freedoms and equalising solidarities.

Violence, civil society and democratic government cannot peacefully
coexist, this maxim implies. For if violence begins to plague the sub-
jects of any democracy then it loses its civility and (in the extreme
case) instead slides towards an uncivil society. That much – as those
who champion the principle of non-violence emphasise – is clear. But
it is important to recognise that the simple ethical equation of non-
violence and democracy does not always work. The straightforward
commitment to non-violence may well have a distinguished history
featuring distinguished writers like Thoreau and W. H. Auden, but
today, in the era of triangular violence, our thinking about violence
and democracy needs to become more complicated. For there are times
and circumstances – the caveat is crucial – when violence functions as
a basic, if highly paradoxical, precondition of the pursuit or preserva-
tion of a civil democracy. Let us call this the Paradox of Civil Violence
and – for the purpose of bringing greater clarity to the field of demo-
cratic ethics – explore some of its contours, first at the individual and
then at the collective levels.
Consider the contentious matter of self-violation under duress.
Although the will to live is usually a brave act of defiance against the
violence of captors who would like nothing better than their captives’
suicide – as in the annihilation camps during the period of Stalinism –
there are sometimes circumstances in which there is no shortage of
good reasons to kill oneself, and in which, thus, the act of suicide is not
unreasonable. A dramatic example: Jan Palach’s brave burning of him-
self in Wenceslas Square in Prague in January 1969, shortly after the
Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.5 In his subsequent appeal, issued
from his hospital bed as he lay dying, that others resist the invasion
peacefully in various ways, Palach demonstrated that violated subjects
can be forced by circumstances to choose whether to lose everything,
5
See the interview with Jan Kavan in Michael Randle, People Power: The Building of a
New European Home (Stroud 1991), p. 153. The background political circumstances
are detailed in my Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (London and New
York 2000), pp. 200–33.
spiritually speaking, or instead to take their lives, both as a protest

against the present incivility and as an expression of the wish that
there be a future world freed from the scourge of violence. These are
circumstances in which the forces of free will and determinism are
mixed together. Palach was convinced that everything had capsized
and that his nation was drowning in nothingness. His act of putting
himself to death in public was nevertheless chosen. His choice cast
doubt upon the old prejudice that those who kill themselves, even if
they do so spectacularly, simply depart from the realm of the visible
and enter a zone of ‘malign opacity’ (Baudelaire), in which relations
with others are forever destroyed. Suicide is not always a synonym
for clandestinity. It can be a public affirmation of civility, in which,
paradoxically, the courage and principles of the person who has taken
their own life ensure that she or he is lifted out of time and – by being
remembered – honoured by others with a form of immortality.
Questions concerning the relationship between violence and
democracy and civil society are undoubtedly complicated by the prob-
lem of whether individuals’ choice to suicide, strictly speaking, is
anything like a self-chosen act, or whether it is better understood as
a desperate act of last resort when the subject concludes that since
all other options have been taken away, self-violation is the most
‘civil’ way of completing one’s existence on earth. Steeped in the cus-
toms of the civilising process, restrained by religious prohibitions,
and encouraged by modern advances in medicine, we tend to blanch
at talk of suicide. This reticence persists despite the ironic fact that
Christianity, which refuses to sanction suicide, is founded on an act
of self-sacrifice (John Donne even contended that Jesus committed
suicide); and despite the fact (a bitter pill that some honest liberals
have been forced to swallow) that the principle of self-determination
of citizens implies, and under extreme duress may well require, an
act of self-destruction. Many of us still prefer to regard death as the
potentially avoidable entropy of the body. We think of it as the last
great barrier to immortality. The age of pestilence and famine seems
to be behind us; so long as we are lucky to avoid a brush with fatal
e t h i c s 141
accidents or grossly uncivil acts, death for around 80 per cent of citi-
zens in the developed world has been transformed into a more or less
distant destination along a long, winding and predictably downhill
road called delayed degenerative disease.6 Death loses its sting, but
so too does the perfectly worded suicide note of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman: ‘I have preferred chloroform to cancer.’
Suicide seems irrational. It gets the cold shoulder. True, the
corpses of those who take their own lives are no longer dragged, beaten
and mutilated, through the streets by a braying crowd who gather to
watch and taunt their ignominious burial alongside a lonely stretch
of highway. Yet those who suicide still incur the prejudice of clini-
cians who think them manic or depressive; the contempt of moral-
ising clergy who judge them evil; and the mercenary processing of
life insurance agents who look unfavourably on their heirs, some-
times frustrating their inheritances. Few people seem to understand
that, under circumstances that are not chosen, death can be rationally
chosen, that one’s life can serve to affirm a life well lived before the
deterioration of the body sets in, bringing with it physical or emo-
tional damage that appears to the subject as worse than death itself.
That at least is the case of those who champion physician-assisted
death or voluntary euthanasia in circumstances of terminal illness.
Still fewer seem to understand Jan Palach’s personal conviction that
a noble death is always preferable to an ignoble life. Under despotic
conditions, suicide is of course a consciously willed but not freely
chosen decision. Those who choose to end their lives would probably
not do so in the absence of a conquering power. Yet in such contexts,
suicide arguably serves to distinguish a citizen from a subject. As
Shakespeare’s Antony pointed out, suicide sends a clear message to
friends and foes alike: ‘I am conqueror of myself.’
Any democratic consideration of the ethics of violence must
also confront the possibility that there are times and places when the
6
A good survey of the history and changing attitudes towards death by suicide is
Margaret Pabst Battin, Ethical Issues in Suicide (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1995).
deployment of violence by whole groups against their opponents may

serve as a basic condition of building or developing a civil society
marked by tolerance, pluralism and democratic accountability proce-
dures. The links between violence and civil society and democracy are
more complicated than most observers imagine. Those who take up
the sword, it has often been said, shall perish by the sword. ‘Blessed are
the meek, for they shall inherit the earth . . . Blessed are they which
are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of
Heaven’, others add. Well and good. But, as Simone Weil pointed out,
there are times when the meek defenders of democracy, those who
refuse to take up the sword, or relinquish it, simply perish on the
cross after suffering indescribable hell on earth.
That is why the collective deployment of violence against oth-
ers, taking up arms against a sea of troubles, may sometimes serve,
against all odds, as a symbolic moral protest against absolute evil
and, therefore, as a signal to future generations that gross incivility
will not be tolerated. Examples include the Warsaw ghetto uprising
against Nazi occupation; or the effective tactic of Auschwitz prison-
ers responsible for washing and ironing SS uniforms, who searched
for comrades who had died of typhus, picked the racially unpreju-
diced lice off their corpses, and then slipped them under the collars
of the neatly ironed military jackets of their future victims. Collec-
tive violence may also serve effectively to stop the perpetrators of
violence in their tracks, as in the British resistance to Nazism dur-
ing World War II and in some successfully executed ‘wars of liber-
ation’, like that waged in Eritrea against the Ethiopian regimes of
Hailie Selassie and Colonel Mengistu. Collective violence – actual or
threatened – may throw the violent off balance, cause them to act
foolishly, even to lay down their arms, to abandon the conflict or
(as Clausewitz pointed out) to refrain from using violence in the first
place.
Collective violence may also have a profoundly transformative
effect upon individuals. It can sometimes enable them to shake off fear
and servitude and to live as free and equal citizens. One example: the
e t h i c s 143
early twentieth-century transition to parliamentary democracy and

universal suffrage, it should not be forgotten, was catalysed by (threats
of) violence, and not just on the domestic front. War and rumours of
war tested the competence of ruling elites, visibly exposed previously
hidden inequalities, created new solidarities and swept away monar-
chic arrogance. Whether today’s triangle of violence will produce
analogous effects is doubtful, and even the earlier twentieth-century
violent transition to parliamentary democracy had immense costs –
violence at home and abroad left deep scars upon the body of the new-
born democracies. The point being suggested here is that there is no
universal rule that war supports democracy. The claim that violence
always has a liberating, cathartic impact upon the perpetrators, as
Fanon famously supposed in his call for revolutionary violence of the
colonised against the colonisers, is questionable. Fanon’s account (in
Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) and Les Damnés de la terre (1961))
of how the depersonalised colonial subject can violently defeat the
system of violence that dislocates and disempowers it demonstrably
romanticises the gun and the bomb. It does so by camouflaging the
ugliness of violence with a hotchpotch of assumptions – in Fanon’s
case, a faith in existentialist humanism, a crudely modernist belief
in history as progress towards perfection, and a species of psychiatry
that suppressed the scraps of evidence within his own clinical reports
that showed just how deeply disturbed some individuals are by the
agitated hallucinations and terrifying phantoms caused by their own
violent acts of liberation.7 None of these assumptions properly belong
in a democratic ethics of violence.
trenton
And yet – the qualification is perplexing – there is still plenty of
counter-evidence that there are times and places when acts of col-
lective violence serve to lift the spirits of the unfree and unjustly
7
Jock McCulloch, Black Soul, White Artifact. Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social
Theory (Cambridge and New York 1983), especially pp. 93–5.
treated, to give them the courage to stand against those who violate
them, even to triumph without proceeding to massacre their con-
quered opponents. Consider the following example of how character
can be positively transformed by civil violence: the American Revo-
lutionary struggle against the British during the 1770s.
The conflict in the American colonies was something of a pro-
totype of the early modern form of collective resistance to despotism,
backed by force of arms. True, it was neither a war of national libera-
tion nor a struggle for ‘democracy’, simply because the revolutionar-
ies thought of themselves as republicans concerned to put an end to
popish despotism. And unlike the total wars that followed the French
revolution, it is also true that the American struggle for independence
was a part-time war. The struggle for territory and military supremacy
was subordinated to the battle for the hearts and minds of the popu-
lation. Soldiers took time off from battle. That is why, even when the
American forces were unsure of survival, let alone victory, its troops
found time to recuperate from their duties without immediate fear of
being dragged away by their British enemies.
Compared with most modern revolutions, it is also true that the
American upheaval was self-restrained. It witnessed comparatively
small amounts of physical violence, even in the form of threats. The
general tactic of smoking out loyalists from the nooks and crannies of
civil society by means of purgative rituals such as taking and publish-
ing names, oath taking and threats to confiscate property was widely
practised at the local community level, and with considerable suc-
cess.8 The tactic of turning suspected loyalists into social outcasts
was designed to avoid violence and counter-violence. It effectively
confronted loyalists with two choices: to conform, or to leave. No
more than one loyalist in eight left the United States, but many more
chose to switch localities, most of them unharmed by violence.
8
John W. Shy, ‘Force, order, and democracy in the American Revolution’, in The Amer-
ican Revolution: Its Character and Limits, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York and London
1987), pp. 78–9.
e t h i c s 145
The Americans’ struggle against the British Empire nevertheless

relied on the use of civil violence to crush their enemy’s will to power,
and to build a new federated republic. The point that civil violence
was permissible – that it could be used in self-defence for certain
foreseen, strictly defined ends9 – was evidently understood by the
underdressed and dispirited American troops preparing for battle at
the end of 1776 against the superior forces of the British and Hessian
army at Trenton, New Jersey.10 The battle has since become part of
the official American memory of the Revolution, in no small measure
because at the time each side grasped, with utter seriousness, that
a British victory might well cause the American colonists’ struggle
to collapse. The Americans, for their part, badly needed a victory to
divert the British threat to Philadelphia and to inject new life into their
flagging fight for independence. George Washington met the challenge
by assembling volunteers from Philadelphia, a regiment of German
immigrant units from Charles Lee’s command, and a further 500 men
sub-commanded by Horatio Gates – about 6,000 troops in all.
In the late-afternoon light of Christmas Day, 1776, officers
assembled the American troops into small squads and read to them the
text of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis. On the eve of battle, its
opening sentences must have sounded strangely primeval to the ears of
men thinking about death and injury. The words soon became famous
and will always remain so until the cause of citizens’ freedom is extin-
guished. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’, wrote Paine. ‘The
summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves
the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not
easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder
9
The ethical and legal issues of whether individuals have a positive right of self-
defence and, if so, whether and in which ways there ought to be limits upon the
exercise of this right, is explored in Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing. The Self-
Defence Justification of Homicide (Cambridge and New York 1994).
10
A fuller account of the background context, details and symbolic significance of the
battle for Trenton is presented in my Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York and
London 1995), ch. 5.
the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.’ After nightfall, through
a storm of hail and sleet, the American troops were ferried in flat-
bottomed boats across the Delaware. They inched towards Trenton.
Some of them left trails of blood in the snow from their bandaged or
bare feet. Their officers prodded them during halts to keep them from
plummeting into an icy sleep from which they might never awake. By
daybreak, the troops had reached the outskirts of Trenton. That day,
26 December, had been chosen because, one of Washington’s aides
remarked, the Hessian mercenaries occupying the town were known
to ‘make a great deal of Christmas in Germany’ and would proba-
bly be sick from a surfeit of raucous dancing, schnapps and beer. The
American gamble paid handsome dividends. Colonel Johann Gottlieb
Rahl, the German commander at Trenton, was caught in his night-
shirt. He was later mortally wounded in the heavy street fighting
that erupted. By nightfall, the Hessians had been routed; 1,000 men
were taken prisoner and, to the Americans’ delight, nearly all the
enemy stores, including fine German swords and 40 hogsheads of
rum, were captured. Trenton was won. Thanks to the musket, the grip
of the British Empire on America was loosened – with political and
social consequences that are still felt today, in all four corners of the
earth.
Violent episodes like the battle of Trenton force a reconsidera-
tion of the claim, famously defended by Hannah Arendt, that power
and violence have nothing in common. ‘Violence can destroy power; it
is utterly incapable of creating it’, she writes, adding that the category
of power should be reserved for peaceful associations of citizens who
deliberately speak and act in concert.11 Violence is by nature instru-
mental, Arendt continues. Like all means, it always and everywhere
requires guidance and justification, which in turn presupposes a group
of people thinking and acting in terms of the distinction between
means and ends. Arendt admits that in practice violence and power are
commonly intertwined, but her purist insistence on their theoretical
11
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London 1969), pp. 44–56.
e t h i c s 147
division and the primacy of the latter over the former easily lends
itself to pacifist misinterpretation; it overlooks those cases (such as
the American struggle for Trenton) in which violence and power are
positively related; and it underestimates the various ways in which the
outcome of the violent confrontation of armed power groups acting
in concert is often decided not only by power-boosting ‘morale’, but
also by the timing, luck, ferocity and skill with which their weapons
are deployed against each other. Violence can indeed destroy power
relationships (as happens in despotic regimes, as Montesquieu pointed
out), just as power relationships can sometimes stop violence in its
tracks. But out of the barrel of a gun violence can also create bonds
of solidarity, power relationships in Arendt’s sense, where none had
existed before.
revolutionary violence
The propensity, in some circumstances, of violence to raise hopes,
to stimulate awareness that things could be otherwise, and to gal-
vanise actors’ sense that they are all in the same boat has tempted
some modern thinkers to glorify violence. George Sorel’s Réflexions
sur la violence (1908), the classic revolutionary syndicalist recipe for
dramatically toppling the state by means of a mass social movement
from below, is a striking example of this modern fetish of violence.
Réflexions sur la violence is so intoxicated with the elixir of
violence that – in retrospect – it arouses the suspicion that it is wil-
fully blind to the basic incompatibility between the respective organ-
ising principles of violence (the potential annihilation of others) and
democracy (the open tolerance of differences).12 The political context
in which the tract was written obviously differs from our own. Amidst
the growing involvement of socialist movements in party politics, and
12
Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (Paris 1908). The following quotations are
my own translations from the third edition (Paris 1912), which includes ‘Apologie
de la violence’, first published in Matin (18 May 1908). Sorel’s earliest sketch of
a theory of syndicalist violence appears in Insegnamenti sociali della economia
contemporanea, written in 1903, but published only in 1906, pp. 53–5.
inspired by a wave of anti-parliamentary activity throughout western

Europe after the 1902 Belgian general strike,13 Sorel’s defence of syndi-
calism was driven by the expectation of a profound crisis of both parlia-
mentary socialist politics and the capitalist system. Drunk on the idea
of an ‘absolute revolution’ of the workers’ movement against private
property, civil society and the state, Sorel cursed the ‘democratic stu-
pidity’ of socialist party politics. The parliamentary road to socialism
contributes blindly to the growing power and legitimacy of the mod-
ern state (Sorel specifically drew upon Tocqueville’s account of the
rise of democratic despotism). By so strengthening and legitimating
the state machinery, parliamentary socialism contradicts its declared
aim of eventually abolishing the state. Furthermore, he argued, par-
liamentary politics masks the contradictory interests of labour and
capital. Charmed and seduced by the pettifoggery and chicanery of
electoral politics, and especially by promises of social welfare legis-
lation enacted through the state, parliamentary socialism drags the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat far from the path assigned them in
Marx’s theory. Enfeebled classes, Sorel warned, foolishly always put
their trust in the protective powers of government.
Sorel also attacked the parliamentarism for indulging the polit-
ical spirit of Robespierre. Every (attempted) political revolution from
the time of 1789, he argued, has strengthened the repressive powers of
government. Despite good intentions, a parliamentary socialist gov-
ernment would do the same. There are no greater protagonists of order
than victorious revolutionaries. In office – here Sorel anticipated the
later argument of Robert Michels – parliamentary socialism would
institute a kind of dictatorship of politicians over their followers.
Power brokers like Jaurès (a founder of the moderate Parti Socialiste
Français) would in practice act no differently than other political revo-
lutionaries, who upon coming to power have always pleaded ‘reasons
13
See Henriette Roland-Holst, Generalstreik und Sozialdemokratie (Dresden 1902),
especially pp. 53–69; and Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike from
the French Revolution to Poland (Boulder 1984).
e t h i c s 149
of state’ – and accordingly employed repressive legal sanctions and

police methods – against their enemies.
Sorel reasoned that dictatorship could be stopped in its tracks
only if the socialist movement relied upon the resolute class sepa-
ratism of the proletariat. Its militant refusal of centralised political
leadership, its native sympathy for violent action and its growing
belief in the efficacy of strikes – all this exposed the fraudulence of
ruling-class attempts to mediate state and civil society through par-
liamentary politics. The violence of the proletariat, its willingness
forcibly to take matters into its own hands, sharply polarises civil
society. It comes to resemble a field of battle between two antago-
nistic armies. Note Sorel’s proto-fascist conviction that violence has
its charms, that it has a deeply aesthetic dimension, that it needs
therefore to be liberated from the chains of means–ends calculation.
‘The strike is a phenomenon of war’, he wrote. Proletarian violence,
‘beautiful and very heroic’, has emancipating effects. It is honest salva-
tion from the hypocrisy of bourgeois barbarism. The new middle class
of salaried bureaucrats crumbles. Capitalist employers (note Sorel’s
belief in History) are forced to play the class role ascribed to them by
history. Class divisions are deepened and simplified, just when they
seemed in danger of rotting in the marsh of parliamentary politics.
Proletarian direct action, originating in the small-scale, face-to-face
sociétés de résistance of the trade unions, lances the boils of violence
within the bourgeois property and state systems. Direct action also
snaps the chains of bourgeois habit and cowardice, and produces a new
culture of solidarity in civil society. No longer blinded by party pol-
itics, the proletariat is ever more guided and inspired by myth. Sorel
here drew upon Henri-Louis Bergson; when they are believed, clusters
of shared, emotionally charged mental pictures, such as the myth of
a general strike laced with violence, sharpen workers’ determination
to work towards a socialist future. The proletariat, initially in but not
of civil society, ceases to be acted upon. It becomes a living social
movement in possession of itself. It becomes capable of acting against
the power of capital and its state apparatus, without the mediation
of the party form or the party system. This process crystallises in the
actual drama of the general strike, which Sorel, in a telling compari-
son, likened to a Napoleonic battle that crushes its adversary outright.
The general strike of workers makes it clear, Sorel concluded, that
only two historical options remain open to the socialist movement:
either bourgeois decadence or the violent struggles of the proletariat
to seize productive property and (note Sorel’s reductionism) to abolish
the state.
anti-par ty politics
Parallels have sometimes been drawn between Sorel’s revolutionary
syndicalism and the strategy of anti-party politics that developed in
central-eastern Europe between the Prague Spring and the so-called
‘velvet’ revolutions of 1989. Notwithstanding their wholly different
political vocabularies, it is true that the protagonists of anti-party poli-
tics shared with the Sorelian strategy a deep antipathy to party politics
and to state power. But there the parallel ended. The differences are
not just of historical interest. They are worth examining because they
tell us much about how, under difficult political circumstances, demo-
cratic ways of life can successfully problematise violence, to the point
where it becomes possible to envisage a polity that neither relies upon
violence as the ultimate weapon in politics nor considers (in Sorel’s
words) violence ‘beautiful and very heroic’.
To begin with, most public defenders of the strategy of anti-party
politics (representatives of groups such as Solidarność and Charta 77)
were deeply suspicious of ideological myths. They rejected the Sore-
lian assumption that a single revolutionary class, arising out of the
heart of civil society, could ever embody la volonté générale. Anti-
party politics – it is summarised here in ideal-typical terms – was
a pluralistic and not a monistic type of opposition. That was why –
again in contrast to Sorel – it rejected the myth of the abolition or
withering away of the state. A democratic society, one containing and
openly valuing many different, often tensely related interests, was
seen to require a framework of governing institutions, which can help
e t h i c s 151
prevent the outbreak of serious domestic conflict, as well as negotiate

with other governments elsewhere on the face of the earth. Hence,
anti-party politics aimed not to abolish political power, but rather
to ‘socialise’ some portion of it, to create a civil society in order to
prevent the encroachment of government upon matters which were
considered, simply speaking, none of its business.
The democratic opposition to Soviet-type, one-party systems
also rejected Sorelian myths of brave and heroic violence. Sorel some-
times tempered his affection for the charms of violence. In less san-
guine moments, he supposed that the nature of violence was to serve
as a cold-blooded means for the realisation of a world-historical end.
‘Proletarian acts of violence . . . are purely and simply acts of war’, he
wrote, ‘Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the
spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants
are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which
armies may have experienced on the battlefield.’14 The opponents of
Soviet-style totalitarianism rejected this ‘just war’ line of argument
as dangerous. ‘Taught by history’, wrote Adam Michnik, ‘we suspect
that by using force to storm the Bastilles of old we shall unwittingly
build new ones.’ He continued: ‘The experience of being corrupted by
terror must be implanted upon the consciousness of everyone who
belongs to a freedom movement. Otherwise, as Simone Weil wrote,
freedom will again become a refugee from the camp of the victors.’15
Violence consumes and de-moralises the person who uses it. ‘Castro
wanted a free Cuba’, Michnik observed, at a critical moment when
Solidarność had its back to the wall:
But in the revolutionary struggle against Batista, he was corrupted

by power. Whoever uses violence to gain power uses violence to
maintain power. Whoever is taught to use violence cannot
relinquish it. In our century, the struggle for freedom has been
14
Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, p. 161.
15
Adam Michnik, ‘Letter from the Gdansk Prison’, The New York Review of Books,
18 July 1985, p. 44.
fixed on power, instead of the creation of civil society. It has

therefore always ended up in the concentration camp.16
Living under a heavily armed regime that ensured that surveil-

lance, military parades, prison and fears of violence were everyday
companions of the whole population, the democratic oppositions of
central-eastern Europe understandably developed a profound antipa-
thy towards the deployment of violence.17 They consequently asso-
ciated bravery not with heroic acts of violence (such as terrorism,
assassinations or kidnappings) against their perceived enemies, but
with the civilised patience of citizens who seek to live decently in an
indecent regime and therefore remain unmoved by acts of violence
directed against them. Writers such as Michnik saw an inner con-
nection between violence and politics. They consequently rejected
the view that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant
with a new one (Marx). Violence was instead seen as synonymous
with haemorrhages and miscarriages – even the death of the body
politic – caused by the forceps of revolution. Violence functioned as
the enemy of all societies, old and new. Again in contrast to Sorel, the
democratic oppositions developed a fundamentally different sense of
time. They rejected fantasies of apocalyptic revolution because they
sensed that a precondition of democratic government and an open civil
16
Adam Michnik, ‘Towards a Civil Society: Hopes for Polish democracy’, an inter-
view with Erica Blair (John Keane), Times Literary Supplement, 19–25 February
1988, reprinted in Letters from Freedom. Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives
(Berkeley and London 1998), pp. 96–113 (at p. 107).
17
The experience of omnipresent violence was expressed sharply during this period in a
well-known Polish anecdote, dating back to the early 1950s, when sections of Polish
industry were restructured to produce arms. A father badly needed a pram for his
newborn child. Unable to find one anywhere in the shops of Warsaw, he approached
a friend, who happened to be working in a factory which manufactured prams – or
so he thought. The friend promised to fetch him a pram, piece by piece. Each day,
the pram factory worker brought his friend bits and pieces, carefully smuggled out
of the factory by stuffing them into his heavy winter overcoat. A fortnight later, the
two friends decided that they now had a complete set of parts. But, the anecdote ran,
when they came to assemble the bits and pieces they found that they had actually
built a machine-gun.
e t h i c s 153
society is that citizens acquire a measure of patience. They envisaged a

peaceful transformation of the one-party system by means of a slowly
ripening development of civil society underneath the edifice of state
power.
Prior to the 1989 revolutions, finally, the protagonists of anti-
party politics shunned violence because they sensed that the possibil-
ity of a civil society and political democracy depends upon shaking off
the presence of the one-party system within each and every individual
by altering the relations of power ‘closest’ to them. Those who lived
a life of anti-party politics rejected the innocent fiction that power in
the one-party system was a thing to be grasped or abolished. Power
was not seen to be concentrated in a single place (for instance, in the
leading echelons of the Party or, in Sorel’s version, within the ruling
bourgeois class). The ruling regime was not divided between those
who had power and those who were powerless. The one-party system
was rather viewed as omnipresent and omnivorous, as a labyrinth of
tunnels and caves in which control, violent repression, fear and self-
censorship swallow up everybody, at the very least by rendering them
silent, amoral and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the pow-
erful. Since the lines of power organised by the one-party system were
seen to pass through all its subjects, ran the reasoning, civilians could
defend themselves against it only by being different in the most rad-
ical sense – by driving the system and its violence out of their own
personal lives. Democratic opposition was seen for this reason to be
most effective when it keeps its distance from the one-party system.
Democratisation was considered not merely a matter, say, of replacing
party-appointed officials with a government or head of state elected
once every few years. Democratisation rather depended on ‘returning
to Europe’ by successfully cultivating non-violent mechanisms of self-
protection, individuation and social cooperation in areas of life ‘under-
neath’ the party-dominated state: in the household, among friends, in
the publishing initiative, the workplace, the parallel economy, and in
the sphere of unofficial culture.
judging violence
What is the relevance, if any, of this way of thinking about violence
for democratic politics? The principled commitment of the demo-
cratic opposition in central-eastern Europe to the strategy of non-
violence arguably highlighted the advantages of pacifist strategies, at
least under certain conditions. To begin with, principled pacifism,
insofar as it complements the plurality of identities that add zest to
a democracy, is certainly a legitimate way of life for subjects enjoy-
ing a government-protected civil society. Haunted by a world that is
full of violence, principled pacifism adds to citizens’ sense that they
have a choice, that this world contains options – that it is dangerous
and, hence, in principle, in need of the democratisation and reduction
of surplus violence, even the elimination of all violence. Partly the
non-violent option does this by ringing alarm bells. Pacifism warns
against the unpredictable effects and unintended consequences of the
strategic reliance upon violent means. And – trapped within a tri-
angle of violence – it heaps doubt upon each and every version, old
and new, of the doctrine of the ‘final conflict’ or ‘victory in the war
against terrorism’. It rejects as dangerous nonsense talk of ‘final solu-
tions’, or of wars ‘to end all wars’ or of violence to ‘end violence’.
It disbelieves chatter about ‘the final revolutionary struggle’ to unite
humanity – or the contemporary doctrines that certain instruments
of destruction are so frightening that they will never be used, or that
they are so perfect they are safe to use. The principled commitment to
non-violence emphasises that violence is incompatible with democ-
racy – that it is anti-social. For this reason, as Martin Luther King Jr
often pointed out when defending pacifism as a tension-creating
strategy, non-violent resistance also operates as a utopia, signalling
to the present or future citizens of any democracy that a world in
which there is less violence or no violence is thinkable, perhaps even
achievable.18
18
See, for example, King, ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail (April 16, 1963)’, in James
Melvin Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope. The Essential Writings of Martin
e t h i c s 155
The potency of this utopia is always reinforced when peaceful

but bold actions win out in circumstances seemingly hostile to the
pacifist option. Not only does non-violent collective action often nur-
ture individuals’ capacity to overcome their fears and strengthen their
courage to act creatively and cooperatively.19 There are also times
when non-violent protest literally disarms violent power. The dra-
matic victory of Greenpeace against the world’s largest oil multina-
tional company, Royal Dutch Shell, in the North Sea in the summer
of 1995 – when activists occupied the obsolete Brent Spar platform
in order to prevent its sinking – is a remarkable example of collec-
tive action guided by principled non-violence. So too is the exemplary
boldness of public figures like M. K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King,
or the brave action of civil society actors like Aung San Suu Kyi, who
defied a cordon of heavily armed Burmese soldiers by walking slowly
towards them, silently daring them to disobey orders – shouted three
times – to open fire on her, forcing them to look away in disgrace,
to lower their rifles, and to allow her to pass gracefully through the
cordon, flanked by her stunned supporters.20 Such episodes of courage
serve as a basic reminder of two points: that violence is the scourge of
democracy, simply because violence is the intended or half-intended
denial of the physical and mental being-in-the-world of an individual
or group of (potential) civilians; and that violence can and often does
beget violence, that violence is a wild horse, and that those who ride
it can end up on the ground, badly hurt and dragging others in their
train, towards their death.
Luther King Jr. (San Francisco 1986), p. 291: ‘we must see the need of having non-
violent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men [sic] to rise
from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding
and brotherhood’.
19
Ample evidence of these effects of non-violent public action is cited in Gene Sharp,
The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston 1973); and Frederic Solomon and Jacob
R. Fishman, ‘The psychosocial meaning of nonviolence in student civil rights activ-
ities’, Psychiatry, 25 (1964), pp. 227–36.
20
M. K. Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) (New York 1951), pp. 77–90;
Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail’; and Aung San Suu Kyi,
The Voice of Hope (London 1997).
The fact that those who use violence are often themselves vio-
lated, such that violence kills off the potential democrat in both the
violator and the violated, is often downplayed by the intellectual crit-
ics of pacifism. They prefer instead to point out that the dogmatic com-
mitment to an ultimate goal grounded in a First Principle, of which
religious or moral (as distinct from tactical) pacifism is an example,
often produces philosophical and political muddles that are incom-
patible with democratic politics. These critics of dogmatic pacifism
have a point, broached in Orwell’s jibe that following the war against
Nazism there was a question that ‘every pacifist had a clear obliga-
tion to answer . . . “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see
them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without
resorting to war?”’21 Orwell was right to ask this question – and he
was right as well to point out one absurd consequence of Gandhi’s
particular brand of pacifism, which rested upon the teaching that God
exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped
from: his recommendation that German Jews should have committed
collective suicide in order to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
Gandhi found himself trapped in moral tangles more frequently
than is usually realised by his latter-day supporters and critics alike.
Non-violence (ahimsā) was for him required of a world suffused by the
eternal Divine. Within this earthly order, each individual is endowed
with a unique self (swabhāva) and her or his own unique truth (sat),
which implies that all people are required to respect the truths of other
selves. Hence, the principle of non-violence means ‘active love’ of
others: protecting them from harm or destruction and promoting their
well-being. Non-violence serves as an absolute and indivisible norm.
21
George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Selections from Essays and Journalism:
1931–1949 (London 1981), p. 838. Note Orwell’s addition: ‘If you are not prepared to
take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When in
1942, Gandhi . . . urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was
ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths’ (ibid.). The best account of
Gandhi’s richly suggestive but poorly coordinated theory of non-violence is Bhikhu
Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform, revised edition (New Delhi 1999),
chs. 4–3.
e t h i c s 157
It reminds people of the possibility and desirability of a world liberated

from violence (himsā). Principled non-violence confronts and shames
those who are violent with the evils they commit; and it nurtures
creative experiments that aim to perfect the techniques of disarming
them with energetic love. Non-violence aims to drown the islands
and continents of cruelty in ‘an ocean of compassion’. When asked if
violence was justified in restraining a lunatic on a murderous rampage,
Gandhi was emphatic. ‘There must be within you an upwelling of
love and pity towards the wrong-doer’, he replied. ‘When there is that
feeling, it will express itself through some action. It may be a sign,
a glance, even silence. But such as it is, it will melt the heart of the
wrong-doer and check the wrong.’22
Gandhi was sometimes less sure that the pure norm of non-
violence was indivisible. He acknowledged, with regret, that human
existence on earth was impossible without inflicting violence on other
living organisms; since each animal, plant and vegetable was alive, the
human body was a malevolent ‘house of slaughter’. There were times
as well when wilfully killing others was justified because it eman-
cipated them from unbearable pain. The avoidance of violence also
sometimes required defensive violence, as when (Gandhi reasoned)
the Polish resistance committed acts of violence against the Nazis,
or when prisoners resisted their torturers, or when women used their
‘nails and teeth’ and other forms of physical strength to repel men
who tried to rape them. Principled non-violence, Gandhi concluded,
was one value among others (like truth, self-respect and national
independence). That was why violence was ‘understandable’ and
‘infinitely better than cowardice’ or ‘passive, effeminate and helpless
submission’.23 Gandhi’s difficulties suggest that the pacifist struggle
for a peaceful world, one that relies on the tactical principle that the
use of violence is forbidden, can be self-contradictory. Especially in
22
Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford 1987),
vol. 2, p. 432.
23
Gandhi’s remarks are cited in Bhikhu Parekh, Colonialism, Tradition and Reform,
revised edition (New Delhi 1999), pp. 147–51.
circumstances when the renunciation of violence, or the hesitation to

use it, results in the annihilation of its victims – nowadays this might
be called the blue helmet (the UN in Bosnia-Herzegovina) syndrome –
non-violence succours the violent. It stands accused of ignoring the
possibility that the actual or threatened use of counter-violence might
have had demonstrably pacifying effects by convincing the aggressor
to take the finger off the trigger, or even to lay down arms, and to
live and let live. Hence we come to Max Weber’s hard-nosed remark:
‘No ethics in the world can sidestep the fact that in many instances
the attainment of “good” ends is bound to the fact that one must be
willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least
dangerous ones – and facing the possibility or even the probability of
evil ramifications.’24
Given the potentially unpredictable (‘good’ and ‘bad’) conse-
quences of the decision to use or not to use violence for certain
defined ends, democratic politics is well advised to reject both dog-
matic pacifism and the fetish of violence. Both indulge the same
commitment to some kind of absolute normative principle, and to
its implied means. Both approaches therefore cloud and confuse an
already complex normative and tactical issue. They can even suc-
cour the violent and so increase the probability of violence in human
affairs. Democratic thinking and politics should reject all talk of the
need for a General Theory of Violence based on formal ethical prin-
ciples and abstract-general reasoning. It is true that the rejection of
such ethical algebra does not resolve anything except the need to be
politically aware of what can and must be avoided – like cases of wan-
ton violence perpetrated against others. And it is obvious that the
rejection of absolute formulae is unlikely to impress or silence either
those for whom violence is by definition anathema or those who are
so in love with violence that in certain contexts, like revolutions or
a civil society that is crumbling, they are prone to regard violence as
an indispensable means or a thrilling end in itself. There are indeed
24
Max Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’, in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes
Winckelmann (Tübingen 1958), p. 540.
e t h i c s 159
people – crude-minded anarchists, bomb-planting terrorists, fanatical

advocates of a version of jihad not sanctioned by the Qur’an, deranged
members of millenarian cults, murderous street thugs – who would
laugh at the suggestion that violence can or should be subject to rea-
sonable talk or considerations of democratic procedure. They believe
they have Right or Necessity on their side. If they were to think about
the matter at all they would quickly conclude that their own fetish
of violence is universal in the sense that it is absolutely justified and
applicable to each and every conceivable context. Unconvinced by
talk of pluralism and civil society and democracy, they simply want
to reach for the trigger, to kill or to maim others.
When confronted by such types, democracies are left with only
one option: to arrest the violent or, if they resist arrest violently, to
deal with them by using violent means. Violence – publicly account-
able and subject in principle to strict limits – becomes an effective
remedy against the fetishists of violence, who are themselves trapped
in a lethal performative contradiction. By practising their absolutist
principle of violence, they imply that violence can or should have
no ethical or geographic limits – even when it is directed at them.
Thomas Hobbes demonstrated why: if even just a few people in the
world accepted or lived according to the absolutists’ principle of unre-
stricted violence, then nobody would be safe. The fetishists of violence
would have to live with the consequences of an absolute principle –
strictly applied, in the age of nuclear weapons and dirty bombs and
other forms of triangulated violence. That would of course result in
the termination of their and others’ worlds within a matter of min-
utes or hours. No doubt, the fanatics of violence, for instance Timothy
McVeigh (chief architect of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing) or a sui-
cide bomber like 17-year-old Bilal Fahs, one of the first Lebanese ‘mar-
tyrs’,25 might accept that outcome. They would do so in the name of
some type of earthly absolute or transcendental religious standard that
effectively aestheticises violence as both a means and an end. They
25
Martin Kramer, ‘Sacrifice and “self-martyrdom” in Shi’ite Lebanon’, Terrorism and
Political Violence, 3, 3 (Autumn 1991), pp. 30–47.
would massacre innocents in defence of ‘freedom’ or strap explosives

to their bodies and go out to die, along with their enemies, treating the
outcome as an act of sacrifice or divine duty executed in accordance
with some theological principle or higher secular imperative. But if,
in a moment of humility, the fanatics of violence were to face up to
the possibility that their unswerving commitment to violence, when
universally applied, would destroy everybody and everything in the
world, then on pragmatic grounds alone they would be forced to recog-
nise that their own fetish of violence is unacceptable to others. If only
to preserve their own skins, they would be forced to compromise.
They would be obliged to accept that the violence principle has to be
limited – that the use of violence must be restricted by regarding it as
a means of achieving some designated end that is necessarily subject
to calculations that highlight the possible contradiction between ends
that are desired and the means that are chosen for their pursuit.
It goes without saying that every society and age has recognised
the need to tame and restrain the means of violence. The repertoire
of symbolic and institutional restraints is remarkably wide indeed,
but what is unique about democratic ways of thinking and acting is
that full and unembarrassed recognition is given to the vexed rela-
tionship between the ideals of democracy and the use of violence.
From the perspective of a democratic politics, the systematic, unre-
strained use of violence – the total and totalising violence that is
unique to modern, European-type societies – is anathema. Democ-
racy involves the democratisation of violence. It demands the percep-
tion that the term violence is publicly contestable – and stretchable
enough to cover acts that once were not considered violent. Democ-
racy rejects the presumption that violence is ‘natural’ or God-given
or somehow rooted in the way things are. It holds those who use
violence or control the means of violence publicly accountable. It
rests upon mechanisms that ensure that violence is seen as contin-
gent and removable. And in matters of violence – and all other mat-
ters as well – democracy involves the rejection of pseudo-universal
First Principles. Its institutions of publicly accountable government
e t h i c s 161
and an open and equal civil society provide a viable and potent ethic
that treats these institutions as both a necessary precondition and
consequence of moral pluralism.26 That ethical commitment to plu-
ral forms of life implies that there is an elective affinity – but not
an absolute law-like bond – between non-violence and democracy.
From a democratic perspective, violence is ‘bad’, but not always so.
Violence can be deemed ‘good’ only when it serves as an effective
means of creating or strengthening a peaceful civil society secured by
publicly accountable political-legal institutions. Democracy requires
commitment to the rule that violence is only justified when it serves
to reduce or eradicate violence. The converse rule applies: consid-
ered as a means to a designated end, violence can be considered ‘bad’
insofar as it both contradicts that end, veers out of control or results
in growing quantities of surplus violence within the specific social
context or wider body politic in which it is used. One implication
of this rule is clear: the development, stockpiling or use of nuclear
weapons is always bad. So too are ‘dirty bombs’ and biochemical
weapons – as are hand-held guns that swarm like locusts through a
community.
Formulated in this way, democratic reasoning is not wedded
dogmatically to pacifist strategies – despite the fact that democracy
thrives on non-violence and points ultimately to a world without vio-
lence. This of course begs the question of when and where violence
is legitimate under democratic conditions – of how to spot the times
when it is justified to use certain forms of violence for particular pur-
poses against one’s designated opponents. This question cannot be
answered formulaically. It can be answered only tentatively and by
means of decisions that are formulated and applied within the unique
conditions of specific temporal and spatial contexts.
Such an approach – in effect, the commitment to the politics
of democratising violence in all its forms – most certainly does not
26
See the longer discussion of ethics and morals in the final section of my Global Civil
Society? (London 2003).
mean that anything goes, or that the practical use of violence and
considerations about the ethics of violence are subject to the laws of
blindness and arbitrariness. On pragmatic grounds alone, a democratic
ethic of measured violence is opposed unconditionally to weapons
that have ‘overkill’ effects. Besides, the decision to use or to refrain
from using violence is subject to normative restraints. It is a mat-
ter of judgement in the philosophical sense. Judgement, the learned
capacity to choose courses of action in contexts riddled with com-
plexity, is among the chief democratic arts. It relies neither on the
rules of deduction or induction nor the conjectural thinking of abduc-
tion. Judgement avoids flights of fancy as much as it shuns practi-
cal reason in the Kantian sense. Practical reason ‘reasons’ by telling
actors what to do and what not to do. It lays down the law in the
language of imperatives, like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, or ‘An eye for an
eye’.
Judgement avoids categorical imperatives that instruct those
who act always to act in such a way that the criteria of their acts can
become a general law. Judgement tacks between the unique and the
general. It is neither ‘reflective’ nor ‘determinant’ (to use the highly
questionable distinction drawn by Kant to describe decisions that
derive general rules from the particular, or derive the particular from
the general, respectively27 ). Judgement instead involves the recogni-
tion that the practical choice of how to act in any context must be
guided by the appreciation of its particularity. Another way of putting
that recognition is to say that judgement entails the recognition that
this context is unique or different from what we are used to, and
that therefore we need to compare and to contrast it with previous or
contemporaneous situations that more or less resemble the particular
situation at hand.
27
The distinction between die reflektierende Urteilskraft and die bestimmende
Urteilskraft is developed in Immanuel Kant’s introduction to Kritik der Urteils-
kraft, in Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main 1974), vol. X,
sect. 5.
e t h i c s 163
georg elser
The need to recognise that we know that we do not know what is
to be done, that decisions require judgements, and that judgements
lie within the field of force between the particular and the general,
are quintessential features of the art of judgement that, paradoxically,
rescue it from mere arbitrariness. In matters of violence, from a demo-
cratic perspective, we can say that the most plausible working maxim
is: the decision to use or not to use violence for political or social ends,
whether in the household or on the battlefield, is always risky, and
plagued by ongoing confusion and unintended consequences, some
of which sometimes quite unpredictably contradict the stated pur-
pose for which violence was considered the appropriate or effective
means. Ethical judgements about the utility and effects of violence
are therefore necessary. In matters of violence, to be sure, defenders
of a civil society and publicly accountable government must recog-
nise that violence normally – but not always – contradicts and erodes
civility. But before putting this precept on a pedestal, they must also
recognise that the most dangerous thing confronting citizens is not
that they will violate or be violated, or kill or be killed. Far worse
is their abstention from making judgements about violence by sur-
rendering blindly or sheepishly to the prevailing means of violence
and extant relationships of armed or potentially armable power. In
matters of violence, the friends of democracy should not forget Georg
Elser: the humble quarryman who came within 10 minutes of blasting
Adolf Hitler to smithereens in Munich’s Bürgerbräu-Keller, and who
understood well that those who flow with the tide risk ending up on
the rocks of the devils’ islands.
The delicate and often dangerous process of context-bound judg-
ing, exemplified here by the brave action of Georg Elser, is of interest
not only to political philosophers. There is evidence that it is of con-
cern as well to citizens who themselves routinely practise judgement
calls within actually existing democracies, as has been demonstrated
in an early study by Janie Ward of everyday conceptions of violence
among American adolescents of mixed ethnic background.28 A major-

ity of respondents in this sample had themselves suffered or witnessed
violence within the household or neighbourhood. Not surprisingly,
most displayed a sophisticated capacity to reason morally about the
subject. A minority of respondents, those with a reflective under-
standing of ‘care’ as the basic principle needed to resolve conflicts
in human relationships, typically found violence intrinsically wrong.
They reasoned that violence hurt people and was ‘unnecessary, since it
could have been avoided through dialogue’. When pressed to assess the
ethics of the actions of people who felt that they had no other means
than violence to protect themselves and others from danger, the same
respondents considered violence understandable, but morally wrong.
A majority of respondents, by contrast, judged that judgements
about violence were necessary, and that violence was therefore justifi-
able within certain circumstances. Ward distinguished three different,
but related types of moral judgement exercised by her respondents.
Those who thought in terms of the principle of ‘rule- and rights-
governed justice’ considered violence appropriate when used to rem-
edy or avenge undeserved punishment or unfair treatment. Those who
instead combined ‘justice’ with ‘care’ criteria considered that in cir-
cumstances when a person was pushed to the limit and left with no
other option, a woman using retaliatory violence to put an end to her
suffering at the hands of a man, for instance, she or he was justified
in resorting to violence, which was usually seen as an act of empow-
erment. A third group of respondents, those for whom ideas about
‘justice’ and ‘care’ were not simply combined but actually insepara-
ble, judged violence – within certain clearly defined boundaries – to
be a ‘fair’, ‘tolerable’ and ‘acceptable’ means of protecting the self and
others from the danger of irreparable harm.
28
Janie Victoria Ward, ‘Urban adolescents’ conceptions of violence’, in Carol Gilligan
et al. (eds.), Mapping the Moral Domain (Cambridge, MA 1988), pp. 175–200.
Ten rules for democratising
violence
No example is so dangerous as that of violence employed by
well-meaning people for beneficial objects.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1856)
thinking remedies
Greater clarity about the ethics of violence is important for democratic
politics. So too is the careful consideration of the means that can be
used legitimately to reduce or to prevent surplus violence. Every effort
to reduce or rid the world of violence must try to prevent the fetish
or ‘aestheticisation’ of violence. Attention must instead be paid to
the degree of compatibility between the chosen means and the end
in sight, and to the possible or probable unintended consequences of
a chosen course of action. Nietzsche’s wise advice should be heeded:
‘Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process they do
not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the
abyss also looks into you.’1 The democratisation of violence addition-
ally requires greater sensitivity to the repertoire of viable strategies
for eliminating violence in the world around us. Their type and num-
ber is bewilderingly broad. Towards the non-violent end of the spec-
trum are all those ‘soft’ means, including civil disobedience, ‘truth
and reconciliation’ tribunals, psychotherapy and the due process of
law backed by the threat of punishment. Harder means include the
police use of pepper spray and rubber bullets, secret surveillance and
government-enforced amnesties for handing in weapons. The toughest
means – the calculated use of violence, sometimes in ferocious quanti-
ties, to repel violence through warfare – are the most life-threatening,
both for people and democratic institutions. Decisions about whether
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York
1966), p. 89 (translation altered).
and when any of these methods of pacification are compatible with

democracy are controversial. It is clear that a moratorium ought to
be placed on the production and use of weapons – nuclear bombs, for
instance – that have the technical capacity to kill and maim people
and their environment and to do so on a vast scale in a frightening
manner. Matters of judgement nevertheless do not disappear in efforts
to rid the world of surplus violence. Given that the act of ridding the
world of nuclear weapons is desirable, how is this best achieved? What
weapons systems, if any, would replace the bomb? How will nuclear
plants and weapons undergo de-commissioning, and can legal com-
pensation and something like ‘truth and reconciliation’ processes help
the world come to terms with the long history of suffering and long-
term damage caused by the invention of the bomb? Given that apoc-
alyptic terrorism operates like a deadly worm within the entrails of
democracies and the institutions of (global) civil society upon which
they rest, what activist forms of surveillance, policing and military
action are required to defeat it militarily, and thus to reduce the civil-
ian fears that it induces? To what extent are these means compatible
with the goal of preserving the institutions and spirit of democracy,
which (we know from many historical examples) can suffer implosion
and – under extreme conditions – democide when threatened by fear
and violence? Can civil society initiatives complement what can be
achieved through the counter-intelligence and counter-violence of the
police and the armed forces?
In various times and places, under pressure from such questions,
‘softer’ or ‘harder’ means may be considered as legitimate and effective
ways of defending or promoting democratic ways of life. By definition,
their appropriateness depends upon circumstances, and so it cannot
be the job of political reflection to legislate in advance the ‘right’ or
‘proper’ way of democratically ridding the world of violence. In mat-
ters of violence, simple-minded morality plays should be avoided. Far
more can be learned (to stick to literary analogies) from the espionage
novels of Graham Greene: especially the way they probe complex
situations in which appearances are deceptive, ready-made formulae
t e n r u l e s f o r d e m o c r at i s i n g v i o l e n c e 167
don’t work and judgements are as necessary as they are fraught with
potentially evil consequences. Yet while detailed policy proposals and
political tactics remain ineluctably context-dependent, careful reflec-
tion upon the subject of violence and democracy can usefully clar-
ify and highlight their probable advantages and disadvantages. In the
dirty business of violence, given just how threatening it can be for
democracy, political thinking should especially concentrate on defin-
ing what counts as surplus violence and what should not be done – and
on sketching the corresponding ways of thinking and acting that tend
to ensure that such mistakes are avoided. For this purpose, efforts to
democratise violence can profitably rely on rules that serve as guides
to action in specific contexts. Although these democratic rules are
by definition prudential rather than providential, they can have pos-
itively democratic effects. For citizens and policymakers alike, ten
such rules are especially pertinent.
The first rule: always try to understand the motives and context
of the violent. The methods of dealing effectively with incivility in
its milder or murderous forms necessarily vary not only according to
time and place; the methods need to be tailored as well to the form and
motives of the violence to be resisted, or dispensed with. Sometimes
distinctions about the forms and motives of the violent are difficult
to draw, and not only because motives melt away when violence is
bureaucratised. Some violence is so dastardly that motives at first
seem irrelevant. Any person with democratic instincts easily feels at
least an ounce of empathy with the narrator of Jorge Semprun’s The
Long Voyage: ‘There’s no point trying to understand the S.S.; it suffices
to exterminate them.’2 Similar blood vengeance impulses – ‘flog ‘em,
’ang ’em’ – reportedly surface among audiences watching prime-time
television treatments of violence that is shocking in its cruelty. The
instincts aroused by such coverage tend to reinforce the impression of
sameness – that it’s the same old violence and that those responsible
are ‘sick’ and in need of the cell, or a few seconds on the electric chair.
2
Jorge Semprun, The Long Voyage (Toronto 1964), p. 71.
Kicking the habit of thinking of violence through undifferentiated

and motive-less categories becomes difficult. This has unfortunate
policy consequences, for as Hans Toch and others have argued, in the
field of criminal violence, it is impossible to develop effective sen-
tencing practices and responsive treatment programmes unless the
undifferentiated mass of ‘violent offenders’ is broken down into more
meaningful clusters. Only when that is done can more discriminat-
ing identifications of causes and effects and more sensitive prescrip-
tions for control become possible. The seasoned mugger is not the
disturbed sex offender; the impulsive burglar is neither the profes-
sional burglar nor the calculating terrorist nor the chronic disturbed
exploder.3
The analytic recognition of these different categories is a pre-
condition of understanding the motives of the violent, who are typi-
cally individuals who have suffered past or present humiliation. James
Gilligan summarises well the complexities of the point: even the most
apparently ‘insane’ violence, he argues, has an intelligible meaning to
the person who commits it. Among the gifts of psychoanalysis to
democracy is its will to explore and explain the motivations of those
who are violent. Violence is never the product simply of a mens rea –
an ‘evil mind’, as judges are wont to say – nor can it be categorised
under the legal concept of ‘insanity’, which reduces a violent person
to the status of an animal, or a thing that is incapable of judgement
or responsibility for its own actions.
‘Psychoanalytically’, argues Gilligan, ‘all behaviour, including
violent behaviour, whether it is labelled as “bad” or “mad”, is psy-
chologically meaningful. But until it is understood, it cannot be
prevented – that is, brought under individual and societal self-
control.’4 The roots of face-to-face human violence are always enig-
matic, but they are most often traceable to the dispositions of
3
Hans Toch and Kenneth Adams, The Disturbed and Violent Offender (New Haven
and London 1989).
4
James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic (London 2000), p. 9.
character first learned in the household, then later confirmed in adult

life. A randomly chosen case: Bilal Fahs, responsible for victimising
others in Amal’s first ‘self-martyring’ operation in 1984, was himself
a victim of early abuse. Born into poverty, he lived his early years in a
one-room cinder-block house with slum-standard amenities; his pen-
niless father sold vegetables from a cart. A few months after his birth,
Bilal’s mother separated from his father, who remarried and had more
children. The house was crowded beyond endurance, and Bilal, paral-
ysed by feelings of neglect, was sent off to live in another single-room
dwelling, this time with his paternal grandmother.
The case of Bilal Fahs suggests the rule that men of violence
are typically victimised during childhood. Physical abuse, sexual
exploitation, ridicule, rejection: such experiences can produce humil-
iation so deep that they begin to feel like decomposing rubbish. They
become living dead who turn to violence as the only way of avenging
injustice. Seen in this way, the function of violence is to stop oth-
ers in their tracks, to muffle their insulting laughter, to make them
cry instead, so extracting from the world a measure of what is per-
ceived to be justice. It is no accident that most violent, face-to-face
crimes in this world are committed against other men by men who
are desperate, in the face of humiliation, to shore up their ‘manhood’
by defending themselves through the most desperate act: violating the
body of another.
The rule that violence is always bound up with the context
and motives of its agents has an important implication: that descrip-
tions of violence as a timeless substratum of the human condition
should be rejected wherever and in whatever form they surface. The
‘ontologisation’ of violence comes in many guises, ranging from ver-
nacular descriptions of ‘human nature’ as naturally or essentially
prone to violence through to sophisticated philosophical claims, such
as Jacques Derrrida’s reflections on justice.5 Derrida warns against
5
Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of law: the “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, Cardozo
Law Review, 11, 919 (1990), pp. 927–45.
the intellectual tendency within some strands of deconstructionism

to give ‘authorization to violent, unjust, arbitrary force’. He quotes
Pascal:
Force without justice is tyrannical. Justice without force is

contradictory, as there are always the wicked; force without
justice is accused of wrong. And so it is necessary to put justice
and force together; and for this, to make sure that what is just be
strong, or what is strong be just
[‘la force sans la justice est tyrannique. La justice sans force est
contredite, parce qu’il y a toujours des méchants; la force sans la
justice est accusée. Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la
force; et pour cela faire que ce qui est juste soit fort, ou que ce qui
est fort soit juste].
Derrida draws from Pascal the observation that violence and law are
twins, then transforms that proposition into the generative claim that
within any context the emergence of systems of law and justice is
always attended by the exercise of violence; no violence, no legal
judgements, no justice. Insinuating that social and political life can
never be rid of violence, and that foolish are those who think other-
wise, Derrida’s deconstructionism ignores its own warnings against
the ontologisation of violence. ‘The very emergence of justice and
law’, he concludes, ‘the rounding and justifying moment that insti-
tutes law implies a performative force, which is always an interpre-
tative force . . . Its very moment of foundation or institution . . . [is] a
coup de force . . . that in itself is neither just nor unjust.’
Vernacular descriptions of ‘human nature’ as naturally or essen-
tially violent are equally problematic. Exactly because democratic
ways of life inflate and probe the sense that human nature is con-
tingent, the resort to lugubrious accounts of so-called ‘human nature’
is undemocratic. Such pessimistic ontologies suffer from a short and
flawed memory,6 on which basis they then eternalise what is in fact

temporally contingent. Best described as a species of the dogma of
original sin, stripped of the fear or mention of God, these ontologies
are in practice of little or no help in resolving or reducing incivility
in the institutions of either government or civil society. Sometimes
they serve as apologias of frightful violence. Consider the ideologies
of ‘primitivism’, which suppose (for instance) that killing on the scale
witnessed in Bosnia-Herzegovina or in Rwanda during the 1990s is
what one would expect from such regions. For such ideologies, the
very words ‘Balkans’ and ‘Africa’ reek of violence; they are places on
earth where brutish human nature has always clutched at the throats
of the living, uncensored by the codes of civility enjoyed by more
‘civilised’ peoples elsewhere. The ideologists of primitivism often rea-
son inductively. Acts of grisly violence are grist to their mill. They
infer that human nature must be evil for it to fire 120mm mortar
shells into crowded marketplaces, so producing an almighty explo-
sion, followed by a gentle sound like rain or mountain brooks, then a
split-second’s silence as shoppers are blasted off their feet with a force
they have never before experienced, followed by limbs and flecks of
flesh splattered everywhere, the air thick with the screams of the
wounded and dying, leaving behind the wails of relatives, friends and
witnesses, if there are any.
Ontologists of violence are often confident in their clichés. They
speak with conviction and force about how ‘people are naturally evil’,
or ‘wicked’ or ‘creatures of original sin’. But such talk is problematic.
Ignorant of its own historical foundations, it suffers from an indiscrim-
inate acceptance of ‘the facts’ to prove, through induction, its fancies.
It is also uninterested in the motivations of those who kill and are
killed. It doesn’t ask questions. It wants solutions, which explains why
6
Ashley Montagu, The Human Revolution (Cleveland and New York 1965), p. 24: ‘The
violences that have been attributed to his original nature have, in fact, been acquired
predominantly within the relatively recent period of man’s cultural evolution.’
pessimistic ontologies often function as alibis that meld easily into

authoritarian antidotes to incivility. The function of these ontologies,
whether intended or not, is to disarm consciences, to persuade others
that really nothing can be done, except for the strategy of putting trust
in ‘war’ against ‘enemies’, or tougher law and stricter order, or opting
for a private solution (dealing with car thieves by purchasing a lock-
able, corrugated iron garage in Moscow; employing security staff in
London or Tokyo or Abidjan; paying protection money to a warlord
in Rio de Janeiro), all the while hoping for the best, which in practice
means offloading violence and its costs onto others.
So we come to a second rule: wherever possible, exercise cau-
tion and heap doubt upon the schemes and plans of those who talk
of ‘necessity’ and call for the harshest possible remedies – ‘crack-
downs’ and ‘zero tolerance’ and ‘war’ – against those whose violence
is often dismissed as ‘evil’ or ‘pathological’. During the period of
hysteria aroused by Red Army Faction attacks against business and
government in the Federal Republic of Germany, Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt remarked: ‘Those who defend the rule of law must be pre-
pared to go to the limit of what democracy sanctions and permits.’7
The deep ambiguity buried in this statement serves as a reminder
that whenever democracies tackle violence the dangers of hubris and
authoritarianism should not be underestimated. Pressured by exter-
nal violence, democratic governments are sometimes prone to cut
back-room deals with the violent, to provide them with safe havens
in exchange for reciprocal agreements not to conduct violent attacks
within the state’s own territory.8 Suspicion should always be at the
ready when the practitioners of violence talk of ‘necessity’, or ‘emer-
gency’, or ‘classified secrets’, or ‘defending sovereignty’ or ‘going to
the limit’. Especially when things are not going well for the dom-
inant interests, the old democracies are prone to stir up talk of
7
From the documentary film, Baader-Meinhof. In Love with Terror (London 2002).
8
Michel Wieviorka, ‘French politics and strategy on terrorism’, in Barry Rubin (ed.),
The Politics of Counterterrorism: The Ordeal of Democratic States (Washington, DC
1990), pp. 61–90.
this kind. The preoccupation with apocalyptic terrorism in the early

years of the twenty-first century is an example of how violence and
counter-violence breed official clampdowns that are bad for democ-
racy: arrests without charges or trials; the transgression of data pro-
tection laws; armed soldiers in public places; high profile military
exercises; constant chatter about tightened security; whispers about
torture, and getting tough; new legislation in defence of the realm; the
spread of a permanent war mentality.
Meanwhile, in the field of criminal law, there are parallel signs
of a strengthening consensus that criminal violence is a growing
‘pathology’, and that its obscure causes place it beyond realistic
hope of remedy. ‘The very high crime rate of young black males is
an aspect of the pathological situation of the black underclass, but
there do not appear to be any remedies for this situation that are at
once politically feasible and likely to work’, writes the former chief
judge in the US Court of Appeals, adding that ‘there is no feasible
method of preventing parents from beating their children, and also
it is unclear whether the beating causes the later violence or the
beating and the violence are consequences of the genetic endowment
shared by the parents and their children’. These premises lead eas-
ily to the conclusion that the old strategies of flexible sentencing,
supervised parole, treatment for drug dependency, psychotherapy and
job training should be abandoned. ‘Decades of unsuccessful exper-
imentation with different types of rehabilitative programmes have
demonstrated the practical futility of the rehabilitative approach and,
in the process, have largely discredited criminology as a discipline.’ It
is said that multivariate data analyses conducted by social scientists
prove that ‘punishment reduces crime both through deterrence and
through incapacitation’, and it follows that getting tougher is the right
course of action. Violence should greet violence. Crime management
should be directed almost exclusively at protecting civil society from
itself. More prisons – some of them run by profit-seeking ‘security
firms’ – are needed. Tougher policing and swifter arrests should be
matched by the streamlining of the court system. Juries should be
invited to infer from criminal defendants’ refusal to testify that they

have something to hide. Evidence obtained by the authorities in vio-
lation of the law should be considered reliable. Tough sentencing and
extensive incarceration should become commonplace. Consideration
should be given to extending the death penalty to crimes other than
unusually brutal or wanton murders. And the costly protraction of
criminal proceedings, especially in death cases, where (in the United
States, whose prison population has quadrupled in three decades to
over 2 million people) intervals of ten years between sentence and
execution are common and intervals of twenty years are not uncom-
mon, must be stopped.9
From the standpoint of democratic institutions and ideals, this
type of ‘just desserts’ reasoning is founded on questionable premises
that lead to authoritarian conclusions. It is all very well to talk of stop-
ping crime in its tracks, getting it off the streets, keeping it behind bars.
Getting violent with violence is, however, risky. It cultivates the
illusion that the violence of imprisonment and capital punishment
reduces violent crime.10 By ignoring more effective non-violent reme-
dies for incivility, legalised violence also potentially injures civil soci-
ety much more than moderate and occasional criminal violence. The
key problem is the chain reaction that is triggered when violent power
is exercised over others. The power to get others to do what they would
otherwise avoid doing, backed by violent means, easily breeds arro-
gance, the belief that the powerful are immune from responsibility
towards others who are meanwhile forced to suffer pain and humilia-
tion. A culture of control spreads. And whenever arrogance mixes with
violence and power, the temptation to brutalise the bodies of those
who resist is just around the corner. Democracies that use violence
9
Richard Posner, ‘The most punitive nation. A few modest proposals for lowering
the US crime rate’, Times Literary Supplement, number 4822 (1 September 1995),
pp. 3–4.
10
See Frank E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, Incapacitation: Penal Confinement
and the Restraint of Crime (Oxford and New York 1995), a well-known study that
concludes that California’s tripling of its prison population in the 1980s affected
the rate of violent crime insubstantially – 0.007 homicides and 0.055 rapes per
prisoner-year – if at all.
against either their own or other populations are not exempted from
this chain reaction, which often produces a new political division
much worse than that between rich and poor: the cleavage between
the torturable and the non-torturable classes. ‘Every society which
feels itself threatened by dissent’, Pierre Vidal-Naquet pointed out
during the French military campaign against Algerian independence,
‘can quite easily, today or tomorrow, tolerate a sporadic or systematic
use of torture . . . Whatever its nature, all dissent can push the modern
state, however liberal it may be, to the use of torture.’11
A third rule: resist the drift towards authoritarian ‘law and
order’ strategies by firmly reminding politicians, judges, the police
and military that governmental efforts to reduce violence cannot suc-
ceed unless civility and freedom are cultivated at the level of civil
society. Many activist supporters of democracy understandably worry
about the general erosion of civil freedoms that normally accompa-
nies military and police action and the setting up of new security
bureaucracies, like the new Department of Homeland Security in
the United States. They worry as well about the despotic, aggres-
sive and racist effects of attempts to counter grisly terrorist attacks
through clenched-fist military operations, like the Israeli army’s 2002
Operation Defensive Shield, a silver-tongued phrase for describing
the criminal-like invasion, occupation and destruction of Palestinian
cities.12 Arms and calls to arms breed hubris. Civilian life does not
take kindly to the loss of sleep and frayed nerves induced by strip
searching; or by helicopter gun ships chopping the air above the heads
of frightened urban residents; or the tightening of visa regulations and
airport security; or by flag-waving and talk of the need for perma-
nent war against evil. Political power may well grow out of the barrel
of guns, but the velvet power of civil institutions thrives on perma-
nent decommissioning of weapons, responsible exercises of power and
strategies of social pacification.
11
Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, La torture dans la Republique: essai d’histoire et de politique
contemporaines (1954–1962) (Paris 1972), pp. 175 and 14.
12
David Grossman, Death as a Way of Life. Israel Ten Years After Oslo (New York
2003).
This is why, for instance, in efforts to break apart the triangle of

violence that the world has drawn around itself – a triangle bounded by
apocalyptic terrorism, uncivil war and nuclear anarchy – imaginative
political leadership, sting operations, prudent military interventions
and stiff judgements by courts of law will not be enough. If author-
itarian outcomes are to be minimised, anti-violence initiatives that
arise out of civil societies themselves are essential. Surgeons speak of
enucleation to describe the process of removing tumours from shells.
The same term could be used to describe a basic political priority of
the friends of democracy: the systematic removal of nuclear weapons
and weapons-making systems and materials from the structures of the
world’s governmental and non-governmental structures. The priority
will be hard to realise; new peace and disarmament movements will be
required. But not only is a renaissance of militant public campaigns
against nuclear weapons and installations overdue; global citizens’
campaigns against ‘classical’ and apocalyptic forms of terrorism will
also be needed. They will have to bite the bullet: wrestle with the
problem of how and when armed force can be used legitimately to put
a stop to violence in uncivil war zones. Citizens’ campaigns against
uncivil war and political repression and torture (like that of Amnesty
International, which has more than 1 million members in 162 coun-
tries, or the Catholic Relief Services and the International Network of
Engaged Buddhists) will also be needed. Greater support from citizens
and business and government will need to be given as well to civil
society groups like Saferworld – a London-based research and lobby
group that publicises the deadly effects of global arms flows and pres-
sures bodies like the European Union into restricting arms sales to
dictatorial states and armies that abuse the rights of civilians.
Rule number four: wherever and whenever possible, make
efforts to repeal or prevent the ‘privatisation’ of the means of violence.
There are signs, in some regions and many local communities of the
world, of a long-term trend towards the ‘scattering’ and ‘privatisation’
of the means of violence – either ‘outsourced’ to business organisa-
tions or into the hands of civilians, so turning them into paramilitary
or gangster figures. The emergent triangle of violence currently drives
this trend. Black market, cut-price deals on weapons exacerbate the

problem. Global businesses like Executive Outcomes and Brown and
Root Services meanwhile specialise in the provision, for a price, of
such military skills as intelligence, risk assessment, strategic plan-
ning, training, operational support and combat preparations. The con-
sequence is that the day-to-day defence of civilians against imaginary
or actual threats of violence is passing into the hands of a booming
security and war-fighting business. The trend is so strong that it is pos-
sible to imagine times and places where quite a few states’ monopoly
of the means of violence will be permanently eroded, or destroyed
outright, by new forms of condottieri.13
We return at this point to the claim (of Umberto Eco, Tanaka
Akihiko and others) that late modern ships of state are now marooned
and drifting into ‘medieval’ waters. The claim rests upon some his-
torical fantasies, and should therefore be handled with care, espe-
cially since the long and bloody struggle of modern state-builders to
monopolise the means of violence within a given territory has con-
stantly been resisted by urban militias, private armies, armed mercan-
tile companies, privateers, fiscal agents, and armies of regional lords
and rival claimants to royal power.14 There are nevertheless plenty
of documented cases – including uncivil wars – where the contem-
porary structures of government and the social relations of civil soci-
eties are becoming twisted and deformed into grotesque shapes by
gun-wielding gangs and cartels. Fuelled by media and the global net-
working and ‘miniaturisation’ of the means of violence, there seems
to be a worldwide upsurge of non-governmental forms of violence.
Consider just one extreme instance of this anti-democratic
trend: the power structures operated in Colombia by the Medellı́n
and Cali cartels, which together with regional groups in cities like
Bucamaranga and Santa Maria reportedly controlled 80 per cent of the
13
See Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors (Ithaca and London 2003); Gary T. Marx, Civil
Disorder and the Agents of Social Control (Irvington 1993), and Undercover Police
Surveillance in America (New York 1988).
14
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns. State-Building and
Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton 1994).
world’s cocaine production from the 1970s onwards.15 Lorded over by

such figures as El Alacrán (Henry Loaiza Ceballos, or ‘the Scorpion’),
Pablo Escobar (‘the Robin Hood Paisa’) and the Rodrı́guez Orejuela
brothers, no parts of Colombia were left untouched by the structures
of narco-violence. Drugs and guns flowed through the veins of its
social life, twisting the construction industry, football clubs, the taxi
trade, hotels and some newspapers around their violent fingers. As
drug traffickers became major landowners, they began to create private
militia – MAS (Muerte a Secuestradórs, or ‘Death to Kidnappers’) was
the most notorious – to protect their power and investments. Private
guns extended into the military, the police and the judiciary. During
the first half of the 1990s alone, more than 1,500 politicians and trade
union leaders, 1,000 police officers, 70 journalists, 4 presidential can-
didates – out of a field of 6 in 1990 – an attorney general and a governor
were killed by the armed forces and their drug-running paramilitary
allies commanded by such figures as El Alacrán. The Scorpion him-
self symbolised the whole worldwide trend towards the privatisation
of the means of violence. Beginning his career as a sicario, a hitman,
with a reputation for casual ruthlessness, he travelled up through
the drug ranks to lead the military wing of the Cali cartel. He was
there implicated in some of its darkest exploits, such as the 1991
massacre of over 100 peasants, whose bodies were dismembered by
chainsaws.16 Faced with violence of that kind, uncorrupted figures
who tried to set their faces publicly against guns, drugs and killings
were usually provided with rough treatment – or murdered. In 1983,
after being accused in the Colombian Parliament of accepting drug
money, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the then minister of justice, responded
with vehement denials. He then redoubled his attacks on the cartels.
Hundreds of drug-transport planes were seized. Arrests were made.
Whenever the minister travelled, he would pack and repack his own
15
See Winifred Tate, ‘Paramilitaries in Colombia’, The Brown Journal of World Affairs,
8, 1 (Winter/Spring 2001).
16
These events are documented in the Amnesty International report, Political
Violence in Colombia: Myth and Reality (London 1994).
bags, convinced that someone from a cartel somewhere would plant

cocaine on him. His efforts came to nothing. The following year, he
was gunned down and perished in a puddle of blood on the streets of
Bogota.
The Colombian case is an extreme example of the contempo-
rary unpicking of the so-called Westphalian model of territorial states
that monopolise violent resources. Within actually existing civil and
uncivil societies, the possible forms of condottieri are highly vari-
able, ranging from uniformed private enterprise security agents wield-
ing wap phones and walkie-talkies and (where permitted) guns on
their hips through to armed gangs operating under the tutelage of
rough trade warlords. In every case, private antidotes to violence are
self-contradictory, since they bring violence, or threatened violence,
into the heart of social and political life. As antidotes to violence,
private solutions are also unjust – they serve to offload threatened
or actual violence onto others, who are left to cope as best they can,
if they can. Private solutions are always private; they have few or
no socialising effects. They relegate some to the probability of cruel
encounters and bloody deaths; the lucky remainder are free to live
in luxury in laagers, behind compound walls, surrounded by armed
security guards, balaclavaed soldiers, sniffer dogs, electronic alarms
and barbed wire, with loaded guns under the bed.
A fifth rule: in the search for ‘peace’ among civilians and their
governments be constantly on the look out for impractical propos-
als and unworkable solutions dogged by means–ends discrepancies.
In matters of violence, prudence is measured by actors’ level-headed
ability to think in terms of means and ends and to make judgements
about whether the preferred means and ends of action are compati-
ble. The need for prudential rules in a democracy should be obvious,
so just one negative illustration will suffice: the old tactic of imagin-
ing a political community that proves that men and women can live
together in harmony.
The utopian fantasy of a new civilised order liberated from
an old world of violence is discussed in every undergraduate course
in political thinking, but arguably its tactic of non-violently with-

drawing from the world is contradicted – and rendered obsolete – by
the peculiarly modern pressures of state- and empire-building, civil
society formation, weapons technology, and the more recent growth
of a global civil society and an ensemble of governmental institu-
tions that criss-cross and overlap on a world scale.17 Despite such
long-term trends, the lure of a country where violence has no place
has a long pedigree and continuing appeal. Its prototype is the vision,
stretching from Plato’s Republic to Rousseau’s Considérations sur le
gouvernement de Pologne, of a small political community of patri-
otic and potentially armed citizens, who live in isolation from other
political communities; who have no external military or commercial
ambitions; and whose concern for non-violent perfection is matched
by a certain superiority complex and mistrust of foreigners, which
binds them together into a freedom-loving citizenry of potential war-
riors emancipated from the curse of war.
Rousseau’s advice to Count Wielhorski and his fellow Polish
representatives on the eve of the first of the three partitions which
led, in the period between 1772 and 1795, to the disappearance of that
country from the map of Europe, exemplifies this vision. ‘Establish
the Republic so firmly in the hearts of the Poles that they will main-
tain her existence despite all the efforts of her oppressors . . . avoid the
frippery, the garishness and the luxurious decorations usually found in
the courts of kings . . . Begin by contracting your boundaries . . . devote
yourselves to extending and perfecting the system of federal govern-
ment: the only one which combines the advantages of large and small
states’, Rousseau urged. He went on to insist, while looking back over
his shoulder, that ‘our distinction between the legal and the military
castes was unknown to the ancients. Citizens were neither lawyers
nor soldiers nor priests by profession; they performed all these func-
tions as a matter of duty.’ The political moral was clear, or so Rousseau
thought:
17
These various trends are examined in my Global Civil Society? (Cambridge and
New York 2003).
preserve and revive among your people simple customs and

wholesome tastes, and a warlike spirit devoid of ambition . . . Do
not waste your energies in vain negotiations; do not bankrupt
yourselves on ambassadors and ministers to foreign courts; and do
not account alliances and treaties as things of any moment. If you
want to keep yourselves free and happy, heads, hearts and arms
are what you want; it is they that constitute the power of a state
and the prosperity of a people . . . pay little attention to foreign
countries, give little heed to commerce; but multiply as far as
possible your domestic production and consumption of
foodstuffs . . . Each citizen [including the peasantry] should be a
soldier by duty, none by profession. Such was the military system
of the Romans; such is that of the Swiss today; such ought to be
that of every free state, and particularly of Poland.18
The deepening global interdependence of political and economic

forces and the spread and interweaving of unarmed civil societies
with divided identities has arguably transformed this Rousseau-esque
vision of autarkic republican states into an unrealisable utopia. The
splendid isolation that it presupposes, and requires, has also been abol-
ished by the spread of weaponry and military prowess that threatens
all four corners of the earth with annihilation – along with the extinc-
tion of the dictum of von Clausewitz that victory in modern warfare
goes to the army that keeps its nerve longer, wills itself to survive,
and persuades its adversary by means of the gun to lay down arms.
Christa Wolf’s talk of ‘a bomb induced futurelessness’,19 in which
even peace of mind for all peoples has become a thing of the past, may
be exaggerated. But there is no doubt that it correctly draws attention
18
The quotations are my translations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considérations
sur le Gouvernement de Pologne, et sur sa réformation projetée (Geneva 1782).
Rousseau had evidently planned a work on a scheme for a partial federation among
the smaller states of Europe, and had at one time intended to include it in the Contrat
social. He handed a fragment to a French friend, d’Antraigues, who destroyed it in
a panic; see C. E. Vaughan (ed.), The Political Writings of J. J. Rousseau (Cambridge
1915), vol. II, pp. 135–6.
19
Cited in Robert Pfaltzgraff (ed.), The Greens of West Germany (London 1983), p. 4.
to the global obsolescence of peace through autarky. Because we live

in an age of growing interdependence, political autarky is no longer
a viable political goal. Doubters of that conclusion should ponder
four key military developments unique to the last century: American
B-29s in 1945 unloading comprehensive destruction from the unprece-
dented height of 20,000 feet; the counter-detonation by the Russians
of their first atomic bomb in 1949; the Americans’ deployment in
1956 of B-52 intercontinental bombers capable of flying round trips to
Moscow; and the development, by the early 1960s, of intercontinental
ballistic missiles capable of reaching their far-flung targets within
half-an-hour. The twenty-first century will be remembered for another
development: the emergence of a triangle of violence that is capable
of wrecking the world through new forms of ‘unrestricted warfare’ (as
two Chinese military scholars, Xiangsui and Liang, have chillingly
predicted20 ) based on tightening links among its three deadly sides.
Sixth rule: cultivate public awareness of political dilemmas,
including the most fundamental dilemma of all: that democracies
and potential democracies, when faced with violent opposition, must
be prepared to use measured quantities of violence if and when non-
violent strategies fail, or seem inappropriate – even though the gener-
alised use of violence contradicts the spirit and substance of democ-
racy. Violence is an accomplice of dilemmas – complex problems
whose solutions themselves are problematic – and the two often con-
spire to stir up troubles in the neighbourhood of democracy. When
threatened by armed resistance, for example, unarmed police officers
have to consider whether they too need to carry weapons, if only for
self-protection. The outbreak of uncivil war – to mention another
dilemma – breeds sympathy for distant strangers and generates pres-
sures for armed intervention, to kill, to save lives. And a people whose
land is militarily occupied and whose identity is threatened with anni-
hilation, understandably dream of democracy, but meanwhile conduct
their desperate struggle for survival using weapons: bare hands, rocks,
Kalashnikovs, bombs strapped to cars and chests. And so on.
20
Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing 1999).
The subject of violence and democracy is mined with dilem-

mas. A detailed contemporary example, concerning the politics of
Islam, will help to clarify both the problem of dilemmas and the prac-
tical rule which it implies: that, in matters of violence, the ability to
spot and publicly manage dilemmas is a vital requirement of democ-
racy. Especially in countries in which Islam is potentially a dominant
social force, Islamic politics is faced by a strategic problem of how to
handle violence. The background setting needs to be understood. In
Europe and elsewhere, in recent years, those unsympathetic to Islam
have used the problem of violence to demonise it. Especially since the
Iranian Revolution, the epithet ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and descrip-
tions of Islam as a ‘very wicked and evil’ religion (Franklin Graham)
have been deployed to refer to the violent resistance of those radical
Islamic groups and parties – especially networked global organisations
like al-Qaeda, which strictly oppose the interventionist policies of the
West, especially American military power, and call for the liberation of
their lands by using violence against the ‘Zionist-Crusader alliance’.21
The epithet ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ has also functioned as a catch-all
term to refer to any and every practising Muslim – thereby overlooking
the fact that there are many contemporary Islamists who are attempt-
ing to combat the ideology of Islam-as-Fundamentalism by empha-
sising Islam’s capacity for non-violent power-sharing and, thus, its
compatibility with such modern democratic procedures as periodic
elections, parliamentary government and civil liberties.22
There are those – the Egyptian writer Ahmad Shawqi al-Fanjari
and the Tunisian scholar and opposition leader Rachid Al-Ghannouchi
have been among the boldest – who deduce every conceivable
21
The emancipation of holy places in Jerusalem and Mecca is a favourite theme of
Osama bin Laden. ‘The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and
military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country . . . in
order to liberate the al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca]’
(Statement: Jihad against Jews and Crusaders [February 23, 1998], in Barry Rubin
and Judith Colp Rubin (eds.), Anti-American Terrrorism and the Middle East (Oxford
and New York 2002), p. 150).
22
Among the earliest accounts of this recent trend is Edward Said, Covering Islam:
How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World
(London 1981).
democratic right and duty from the Qur’an, the Traditions of the
Prophet and contemporary experience. Al-Fanjari, following the exam-
ple of Rifa’ah Rafi Al-Tahtawi, the pioneer of cultural westernisa-
tion in Egypt, says that every age adopts a different terminology to
convey the concepts of democracy and freedom. What is called free-
dom in Europe is exactly what in Islam is called justice (‘adl), truth
(haqq), consultation (shura) and equality (musawat). Al-Fanjari says
‘the equivalent of freedom in Islam is kindness or mercy (rahmah)
and that of democracy is mutual kindness (tarahum)’.23 He goes on
to remind his readers that in the Qur’an the Prophet is instructed to
show leniency and forgiveness in the very same verse as he is ordered
to consult the believers in the affairs of the community. The Prophet
is reported to have said in turn that God ‘has laid down consultation
as a mercy for His community’. It follows from this interpretation
that Islam, contrary to its Orientalist denigrators, is indeed compat-
ible with democracy because there is no place in it for arbitrary rule
by one man or group of men. The basis of all decisions and actions
of Islamic government should not be individual whim and caprice,
but the shari’ah – the body of interpreted regulations drawn from the
Qur’an and the Traditions.
Al-Ghannouchi adds that Islam passes another test of democ-
racy, in that it satisfies the requirement that any government should
reckon in all its decisions with the wishes of the ruled. In listing the
qualities of a good believer, the Qur’an mentions shura (consultation)
23
Ahmad Shawqi al-Fanjari, Al-hurriyat’ as-siyasiyyah fi’l Islam (Kuwait 1973), pp. 31,
34, cited in Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin 1988), p. 131.
The following comments on Al-Ghannouchi are drawn from my interview with him
on the subject of violence (London, April 2003). See as well ‘The Islamic movement
and violence’, Makalet (1983/4); and ‘The efficiency of using violence to establish an
Islamic state’, in Al-harakah al-Islamiyya wa Manhaj at-Iaghyir (London 2000). His
theory of Islamic democracy is further examined in Azzam Tamimi, Rachid Ghan-
nouchi – A Democrat within Islamism (Oxford and New York 2002). See also John
L. Esposito, Islam and Democracy (New York 1996). A detailed historical survey
of the complex traditions of Islamic thinking about violence is provided in Khaled
Abou El Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge and New York
2001).
and ijima’ (consensus) and in turn places them on the same footing
as compliance with God’s order, saying the prayers and payment of
the alms tax. It follows from this principle of legitimate power, argues
Ghannouchi, that even in contexts where the application of shari’ah is
difficult or impossible, Muslims should work for shura, which implies
joining with ‘secular’ forces in opposing corrupt and violent dictator-
ships everywhere. Standing tall against despotic power, speaking truth
straight to its face, aware of the attendant dangers: this is the highest
form of jihad.
This type of argument about the democratic potential of Islam
deserves global attention. Wherever Muslims are living in significant
numbers, democratic Islam is a potential force for civility, mutual
toleration and power-sharing, exactly because it challenges both the
dogma that the teachings of Islam are essentially ‘fundamentalist’
and its insulting corollary, that all Islamists are gun-wielding power-
mongers.24 Yet arguably Islam can be seen widely as a force for non-
violent power-sharing only if it can successfully handle a strategic
dilemma: how to craft democratic institutions when confronted with
violent opposition, both from within and without its ranks.
Nearly a third of the world’s Muslim believers live in countries
in which they can never hope to become a numerical majority of the
population. In those countries, India, for example, Islamists have cer-
tain (overlapping) political options. They can turn their backs upon
the world (living apolitically as pietist communities, in accordance
with Sayyid Qutb’s instruction that there is an abyss between Islam
and the world which is spanned not by a bridge enabling a meeting
half-way between the two, but one that allows for the ‘godless’ people
of the jahiliyya to cross over to the ‘true believers’ of Islam). Muslims
can also live their faith by caring little for the immediate non-Muslim
‘unbeliever’ society around them and instead bonding with other
Muslims elsewhere in the wider world (the strategy of the Jama’at al
24
John Keane, ‘Power-sharing Islam?’, in Azzam Tamimi (ed.), Power-Sharing Islam?
(London 1993), pp. 15–31.
Tabligh, the largest transnational Islamic organisation in the world).

Or, within their state or locale, these minorities of Islamists can live
their faith and espouse the cause of toleration and civil and political
liberties for all. If they refuse all of these non-violent options, they
are likely to weaken their own socio-political and religious credibil-
ity, especially in the eyes of a potentially threatening and threatened
non-Muslim majority concerned about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.
Within actually existing democracies, matters are fairly cut and
dried: Muslim minorities are either in favour of strengthening demo-
cratic institutions, or they are not. Yet in countries and regions in
which Islam is potentially a dominant social force, Tunisia or Algeria
or Turkey, for instance, Islamic politics feels the pinch of what can be
called the transition to democracy dilemma. Any Islamic movement
that attempts to transform a non-Islamic into an Islamic polity (the
latter is often vaguely defined as a political community based upon the
revealed and interpreted law of Islam) is forced to choose, or to steer
a perilous course, between two incompatibles – the ethical principles
of Islam and the potentially violent ways and means of modern terri-
torial state power. Islamic parties that are dedicated to parliamentary
democracy – like the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AK) –
do so on the working assumption that their enemies are civil human
beings, and this in turn limits their range of political tactics. They
embrace public discussion, press conferences, vote-getting and parlia-
mentary numbers, rather than terrorism, street violence and dreams
of a revolutionary putsch. If and when they are elected to office, it
follows that they eschew dictatorship as a means of staying in office.
If voted out of office, as Rachid Al-Ghannouchi has urged, they should
then leave peacefully, to prepare for future electoral battles.
Of course, an Islamic party or movement that remains faithful
to its own principles and to these democratic procedures may never
achieve governmental power. Many democratic followers of Islam like
to quote the Qur’an: ‘O you who believe! stand out firmly for Allah,
as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others towards
you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just, that is
next to piety, and fear Allah. For Allah is well acquainted with all that
you do’ (5; 8). Well and good. But especially in contexts where their
opponents do not abide by the power-sharing rules of democracy –
violent dictatorships are still predominant within the heartlands of
the Muslim world – Islamists find themselves outwitted, censored,
beaten up, arrested, executed, or forced into exile. Under such cir-
cumstances, which are today the norm for most followers of Islam in
the region stretching from Morocco to Malaysia, does this mean that
the vision of a democratic government infused with the principles of
Islam is both a contradiction in terms and a practical impossibility? Or
can an Islamic polity be achieved only if Islamists are prepared to aban-
don the democratic method temporarily to attain power by violence
in the pious hope that an Islamic government so formed will return to
the practice of parliamentary power-sharing once Islam has assumed
control? Needless to say, this second alternative contains tragic possi-
bilities: a movement for democracy that resorts to despotic methods
to achieve its goals will not remain a democratic movement for long.
Its chosen means will devour its chosen ends. And yet – here is the
painful dilemma – the first alternative, that of clinging to parliamen-
tary democratic procedures under all circumstances, may well doom
Islam to a permanent political wilderness: to a land of hostility and
war against Islam.
The transition to democracy dilemma sometimes becomes
acute. A disturbing example of its failed resolution is Algeria during
the 1990s; between 1992 and 2000, more than 100,000 people were
killed after the military-dominated High Committee of State voided
the country’s first multiparty general elections in December 1991,
when the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won an absolute majority of
votes. The military’s intervention led to thousands of disappearances,
the brutal punishment of its opponents and to the general terrorisa-
tion of the rest of society. Its violence was matched by the retaliatory
violence of certain Islamist factions, notably the supporters of the
Armed Islamic Group (GIA). Specialising in the art of waging hit-
and-run attacks against civilians and security forces, GIA militants
regarded democracy as a kind of jahiliyya, whose violent terror had to
be combated, tooth and nail, with bombings, guerilla ambushes, and
throat slashings. Whole villages were massacred. Foreigners resident

in Algeria were hunted down. An airliner was hijacked. Kidnappings,
assassinations and bombings, including car bombs planted in crowded
urban areas, became everyday phenomena.25
Such savagery, unfolding as it does within a vortex of violence
and counter-violence, serves as a warning of the bleak consequences of
attempting to resolve the transition dilemma by guns and bombs. Yet
the gory details of the Algerian case are not necessarily a cause for gen-
eral despair. While by definition any dilemma is insoluble, its force can
in practice be attenuated in various ways, and it is therefore of interest
to note that contemporary political thinkers and actors in countries
such as Iran and Tunisia and the Lebanon have begun to set their
imaginations loose on the problem of how to maximise the chances
of securing a democratic Islamic government in contexts where
its bully opponents do not play by the rules of the democratic game.
These democratically-minded Islamists are clear about several
matters. First, an Islamic party or government that attempts to come
to power and then to rule by terror, force and intrigue is regarded by
them as a contradiction in terms. It is (to mention the arguments
of Ahmad Shawqi al-Fanjari and Rachid Al-Ghannouchi) anti-Islamic
and therefore anti-democratic, even anti-political. The radical voices
of Islam repeat the mistakes of the Kharijit sect: their conclusion that
political change requires bullets and not ballots rests upon the dan-
gerous rejection of politics in favour of the arrogant dualism between
true belief (iman) and false unbelief (kufr). Some Muslims indeed like
to speak of the Qur’anic principle that necessities eliminate prohi-
bitions. It is as if they yearn to confirm René Girard’s well-known
thesis that religious rituals function to offload violence on to the bod-
ies of others, to keep violence outside the religious community by
scapegoating others.26 ‘If one is faced by necessity’, they say, ‘wilful
25
Habib Sovaı̈dia, La sale guerre (Paris 2003); Human Rights Watch, Time for Reck-
oning: Enforced Disappearances in Algeria (www.hrw.org/reports/2003/Algeria
0203/)
26
René Girard, Le Bouc émissaire (Paris 1982), especially chs. 3 and 4.
disobedience or the transgression of due limits are guiltless.’ But these

Muslims also know that ‘necessity’ (dharoura), a jurists’ term for what
is prohibited, is not a category with a straightforward meaning. They
also know that nowhere does the Qur’an sanction permanent violence
(ūnf) or violence unstructured by a designated end. Passages such as
‘Allah does not wish to place you in difficulty, but to purify you, and
to complete His favour to you’ (5; 6) can hardly be read as an incite-
ment to unrestrained violence. Ibn Khaldun (says Al-Ghannouchi) was
firm about this; those who raise their weapons without taking into
account their consequences and costs – what Khaldun called ‘rash-
ness in war’27 – must be punished. The Qur’an is not synonymous
with the sword. Jihad, the fight against godlessness outside or inside
the believer, is always to be constrained by the avoidance of discord
(fitnah), the granting of mercy (rahmah), the imperative of justice
(‘adl), and the pursuit of peaceful reform (islah).
Democratically minded Islamists insist on another point: that in
the struggle for more democracy the methods used strongly condition
the tactics and methods of its opponents. The latter are never simply
given, and they should not be thought to be so. It follows that success-
ful transitions to democracy are always a learning process in which –
as in many of the ‘velvet revolutions’ of central and eastern Europe,
and in the events immediately following the Turkish general election
in 2002 – the opponents of democracy can sometimes be convinced to
minimise their acts of sabotage and to relinquish at least some of their
power democratically. The point for these Islamists is that violence is
a wild horse that can ruin its rider. ‘Violence cannot be an alternative.
If it resolves one problem, it creates many others’, notes Fadlallah.28
‘Violence is an inferior form of jihad and is legitimate only in excep-
tional circumstances, such as self-defence under military occupation’,
says Al-Ghannouchi. ‘Even then it risks stooping to the low practices
27
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History (London 1958), vol. II,
ch. 3, sect. 35, p. 85.
28
From my interview with Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah
(Beirut), 9 December 2002.
of dictators who specialize in the uncourageous art of violence.’ Terror

breeds fear and armed jihad breeds military crackdown or internecine
violence – like that which took place between the Shi’ite supporters
of Hizbullah and Amal in southern Lebanon. When that happens, the
whole political order suffers: ‘violence against one part of the body
politic is violence against its whole’, notes Al-Ghannouchi. Peaceful
democratic methods, by contrast, can be politically life-enhancing.
Even their opponents can see the vital advantage of non-violence: that
by reducing the fear of excommunication (takfir) and death it enables
everybody to sleep peacefully in their beds at night.
Contemporary Islamists who pursue the parliamentary road
reinforce their case by refusing to make a fetish of the ideal of
sovereign state power. For a variety of reasons that are linked with
the contemporary growth of a worldwide system of cosmocratic insti-
tutions, certain regions such as the Maghreb and the Middle East are
witnessing the decay of territorial state power. Whole areas of this
world are beginning to resemble the form of the world described by
Althusius, in which monarchs were forced to share power and author-
ity with a variety of subordinate and higher powers. The trend has
profound implications for the struggle for Islamic government. It ren-
ders implausible the revolutionary strategy of seizing state power,
if need be through the use of force, precisely because the ‘centres’
of state power are tending to become more dispersed and subject to
(local, regional and global) cross-pressures. Hence governmental insti-
tutions are either immune from ‘capture’ by a single party or govern-
ment, or (as in contemporary Iran) they are necessarily subject to the
push and pull of social forces within and without the country. Not
only that, but in so far as ‘the state’ ceases to be in one place to be
‘seized’, the struggle by Islamists to monopolise state power, while
remaining strategically important, is no longer imperative. The often
poorly coordinated and dispersed (if authoritarian and violent) char-
acter of state power, whether in Iran, Egypt, Morocco or Malaysia,
makes it highly susceptible to the initiatives of social organisations
and movements. It becomes possible, even imperative, for Islamists to
practise the non-violent art of divide-and-rule from below by mobilis-

ing both traditional ‘folk’ and ‘modern’ versions of the belief in Islam,
and by cultivating their ‘grass-roots’ networks, above all through pro-
fessions, in local mosques, clinics and schools. In the view of demo-
cratically inclined Islamists, in other words, Islam can attenuate the
transition-to-democracy dilemma by seeing that ‘violent power is
always weak power’, and that ‘dictatorship is the weakest form of
all’ (Al-Ghannouchi). Islam, the most socially conscious of world reli-
gions, should initially concentrate its energies within the nooks and
crannies of civil society. There, in areas of life underneath and out-
side of territorial states, it can do something violence can never do:
empower its followers by stimulating their awareness that ordinary
people doing extraordinary things out of simple decency is possible,
and that this is the way to win people’s hearts. On that basis, it
can teach them that large organisations – such as transnational firms
and dictatorial states – ultimately rest upon the molecular networks
of power of civil society. This teaching has an important corollary;
the strengthening and transformation of the micro-power relations of
civil society through ‘small efforts’ (Al-Ghannouchi), like acts of char-
ity and the witnessing of injustice, necessarily affect the operations
of large-scale organisations, even when they resort to violence. So
these Islamists draw their overall political conclusion: while a more
democratic order cannot be built without governmental power, they
contend, so it cannot be built through political institutions alone.
Democratisation is neither the outright enemy nor the unconditional
friend of governmental power. It requires government to govern civil
society neither too little – nor too much.
Rule number seven: use every available means of communica-
tion to publicise acts of violence so that their causes and effects are
subject to public debate and publicly accountable remedies. Democ-
racies continue to harbour many forms of violence that are suffered in
silence. Consider acts of rape, in which sexual intercourse is coerced
by violence or its threat. Criminologists concur that this form of
violence remains chronically underreported, while some estimate that
in countries such as Germany and the United States perhaps only one
rape in twenty is officially recorded through a publicly available crime
report. The figure may be higher among gays and lesbians. In hetero-
sexual relations, the rape of women by men goes unreported for a vari-
ety of reasons, among the most obvious of which is the sense of shame
at having been victimised in one of the most personal of crimes and
(in the case of rape within marriage) the financial penalties and child-
damaging consequences of calling a dastardly act by its right name.
But many who suffer the violence of rape complain about other factors
that are deemed equally, if not more, important: the loss of privacy
and the sense of being humiliated by medical and laboratory proce-
dures designed to establish the veracity of the victim’s allegations;
the misogyny of criminal justice officials who believe the charge of
rape is suspect because the woman herself has dressed or behaved in
ways that ‘invited’ sexual intercourse; and the consequent hell caused
to the victim by having to prove legally that she is innocent in the
attack that she has suffered.
There are various weapons for breaking down these barriers,
including tougher policing, better laws and ridding courtrooms of
misogynist judges. But arguably the factor that is most empowering
of those who suffer rape – initially encouraging them to do something
about their suffering – is greater publicity of the crime of rape itself.
Once upon a time, news of unwanted sexual violations of the body
was locally confined, and widely ignored by the political authorities,
who sometimes went out of their way to remind everybody that in
this or that case rape could not have resulted in pregnancy because
(so it was widely believed) orgasm was a precondition of concep-
tion and orgasm implied consent. Historians tell us that only two
rapes in the seventeenth century and six in the eighteenth century
were heard by tribunals in Amsterdam; that judges in Frankfurt only
heard two such cases between the years 1562 and 1695; that from
1650 to 1815 there were only forty accused rapists in Geneva; and
that the Parlement of Paris, the French appeals court with the widest
jurisdiction in the kingdom, heard on average only three rape cases a

decade between the years 1540 and 1692.29
The surviving figures are redolent of times when women were
considered the chattels of men, who got off lightly for brutalising
women, in part because (as one assailant boasted to his victim near
the town of Whitby, England) ‘no one but the ships will hear your
screams’.30 The figures suggest something else: that on balance the
advent of print culture and (during the twentieth century) societies of
communicative abundance have helped in the long run to erode the
silence and coded symbolism that surrounds rape and other forms of
violence. Mediated news of violence can of course be politically dan-
gerous when it touches on governmental or ecclesiastical authority,
which is why in Europe the first print representations of violence
were heavily censored by state authorities. Broadsheets describing
crimes and punishments were usually outlawed. Tongues were cut out
and books burned. Certain forms of censorship were later relaxed to
allow religious representations of violence that offered readers moral
lessons covering such ‘wicked’ and ‘repulsive’ crimes as armed rob-
bery and murder (as in the popular pliegos de cordel literature in
eighteenth-century Spain). During the same century, newspaper, pam-
phlet and broadsheet representations of violence expanded the reper-
toire of images of the violent, for instance in descriptions of armed
robbers as buffoons or as exotic ‘noble bandits’, like the Spaniard,
Diego Corrientes, who robbed the rich to aid the poor. A trend towards
the democratisation of violence – the public circulation of different
and sometimes conflicting images of violence and its origins – had
begun.
The same trend continues today, albeit in heightened form and
by means of different communications media. We live in times in
29
Julius R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York 2001),
p. 141.
30
Cited in Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England,
1770–1845 (London 1987), p. 25.
which domestic violence, rape, assaults and armed robberies, the

violence of organised crime, riots, assassinations and acts of terror-
ism all seize headlines and serve as ‘lead-ins’ for television and radio
infotainment. To the extent that this coverage convinces audiences
that they live in the most violent of times that can be pacified only
through tighter surveillance and armed power, the overall effect may
prove to be disabling of democracy. That is not a necessary political
outcome, however. A strong counter-trend is observable: saturation
media coverage of violence nurtures the growth of free-standing pub-
lic spheres, in which acts of violence and efforts to deal with them are
witnessed and monitored non-violently by reading, listening, watch-
ing and talking citizens.
How do these public spheres spring up? Their genesis is quite
complex.31 Enveloped within networks of media, most individuals
and groups and movements within actually existing democracies get
the hang of reacting with or against the stories (news, infotainment,
drama, film etc.) that are circulated. Audiences chatter, gossip, make
jokes, roar with laughter, swoon, feel sadness, re-tell stories, and com-
plain of indecency, confusion, shock or boredom. All this is quite
routine; the audience work of re-working media output is a chronic,
everyday affair. It is reinforced by the efforts of journalists, who help to
circulate images and stories that suppose that ‘the audience’ is listen-
ing, reading, watching, chatting on- or off-line. The combined effect
of these trends is that unusual things sometimes happen, with almost
magical effect. Certain stories are whizzed around in the cyclotron
called ‘the media’; scores or hundreds or thousands and even millions
of voices may well join in, and suddenly whole groups or sometimes (it
seems) ‘everybody’ is talking in animated ways about the same figure,
event or actual or expected outcome. A big scoop, a blockbuster media
event, is born. And then, suddenly, sometimes, something even more
unpredictable and quirky happens: a body called ‘the public’ surrounds
the stage. It talks and talks back. There is noise and confusion, some
31
See my Whatever Happened to Democracy? (London 2002).
of it caused by tongues that resemble parrots trapped in a cage. But

common sense usually has its turn, too. Words, sentences, statements
and whole stories begin to count. The story begins to take on a life
of its own – with incalculable effects for governors and governed
alike. The public keeps the experimental performance going, though
not necessarily for long. Media performances, especially blockbuster
events, cannot work without publics, who can at any moment heckle,
applaud, drift off, or desert the theatre in droves.
Admittedly, these publics for the most part do not resemble the
face-to-face gatherings of citizens exemplified by the classical Greek
ekklêsia, the Roman forum, the New England town meeting, or the
rowdy public gatherings sponsored by nineteenth-century Chartism.
And although no membership cards or entry tickets are required, they
are not realms of universal involvement. All publics – including the
global publics that spring up around global media events – tend to
exclude others. Yet it is nonetheless important to see that the publics
that regularly form under conditions of communicative abundance –
the publics who witness or follow stories about bullying or stalking or
rape or genocide – are public in several important senses that we have
inherited from our forebears. These publics are spaces of openness in
which controversies break out over who gets what, when and how,
and in which things once concealed are now revealed, for the alleged
benefit and in the name of many (‘all’) others.
These publics come in various guises and sizes. Some of them
are tiny, like the local circles of newspaper readers who become
acquainted with reports (for instance) of a meeting of angry Turkish-
speaking Germans, called to discuss what can be done about their ver-
bal and physical harassment in the schools, supermarkets and streets
of Berlin. Some micro-publics expand dramatically, like the audiences
for early American rap music’s clever attacks on police brutality and
harassment, evident in KRS One’s ‘Who Protects Us From You?’, a
scarifying, cautionary tale of ghetto life, a militant philosophical rap
using lyrics like ‘Killin’ blacks and callin’ it the law’ and ‘Every time
you say “That’s illegal”, doesn’t mean that that’s true.’ The local
public spheres that sprang up with the rebirth of women’s movements

during the 1960s followed a similar logic of expansion; helped along
by various means of communication, public spaces created by women
appeared within discussion circles, professional associations, clinics,
refuges for battered women and publishing houses. On occasion, these
publics coalesced and made their impact felt as publicly visible media
events, such as demonstrations against rape or in favour of abortion
or lesbian rights, or as sit-ins against bigoted judges and government
officials.
Some public controversies about violence have a wide reach
from the outset. Mediated by national communications systems, they
comprise public spheres that dwell upon such matters as urban vio-
lence, uncivil war and nuclear weapons – and do so by attracting mil-
lions of people who watch, read or listen across vast distances. Sensa-
tions are sometimes their offspring, as in the British tabloids’ ruthless
probing and exploitation of murder, rape and other forms of criminal
violence; or in fast-cut, American-style television talk shows that –
sprinkled with advertisements for fast food and gadgets – simulate
raucous domestic quarrels about matters such as child abuse, cru-
elty to animals and gay violence, in front of selected audiences who
argue bitterly amongst themselves, talk back to the presenter, shout
at experts and question the veracity of the interviewees. The largest
publics of all – those associated with globally staged media events
that dramatise peace conferences, nuclear tests, uncivil wars and mil-
itary invasions – raise questions about the triangle of violence and are
therefore arguably of greatest importance to the whole world. Such
global media coverage of violence is often accused of spreading rituals
of pacification, of rendering audiences mute by seducing them into
fascination with the spectacle of cruel events. That could indeed be
legitimately said of the heavily censored coverage of the Malvinas War
and the first Gulf War. But there are plenty of counter-examples, like
the coverage of the Tiananmen crisis in China during the late spring of
1989, or of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in which global publics
not only form, but are linked to the growth of a ‘politics of pity’; by
witnessing others’ terrible suffering at the hands of violence, millions
of people around the world are sometimes so shaken that they speak to
others, donate money or time, draw their own conclusions, or support
the general principle that humanitarian intervention – the obligation
to assist someone in danger, as contemporary French law puts it – can
and should override the old crocodilian formula that might equals
right.32
What is most significant about public spheres and the politics of
pity they nurture is that they potentially contribute to the long-term
project of democratising violence in its various forms. By portraying
uncivil acts as deeply contingent, as ‘man-made’ events with culprits
and victims, they encourage audiences to live for a while in the sub-
junctive sense, to heighten their sense that the prevailing ‘laws’ of
society and government are far from ‘natural’, to see with their own
eyes that the shape of the world as it is partly depends on current
efforts to refashion it violently or non-violently, according to certain
power criteria. Understood in this rather old-fashioned way,33 pub-
lic spheres are a basic condition of reducing or eliminating incivility
and of minimising the chances of its recurrence. Within and among
countries striving to become or to remain democratic, they ought to
32
See my Global Civil Society? (Cambridge and New York 2003), pp. 166ff.
33
To link together violence and publicity is to rediscover and breathe new life into a
theme of political thought that is traceable – in the case of Europe – to the Roman
legal system, with its emphasis on the inviolability of peacefully negotiated agree-
ments and treaties (pacta sunt servanda). Its roots run deeper still, to the Greek
conviction that public life and violence had nothing in common, essentially because
men distinguish themselves from the animals by virtue of their capacity for speech
(lexis) and action (praxis) and, thus, by their propensity for publicly banding together
into a polis of citizens protected from physical violence by walls around their city.
The presumed tension between violence and public speech and action was a theme
subsequently revived and made a prominent feature of the struggle against despotic
states in the European region. The language of ‘the public’, ‘public virtue’ and ‘public
opinion’ was directed against monarchs and courts suspected of acting arbitrarily,
of abusing their power violently, and of furthering their ‘private’, selfish interests
at the expense of the realm. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
normative ideal of the public sphere – a realm of life in which citizens invented
their identities under the shadow of state power – was especially popular among
republicans like the ‘Commonwealthmen’, who simultaneously looked back to the
Roman republic (and sometimes to the Greek polis) and forward to a world with-
out mean-spirited executive power, standing armies and bloody struggles caused by
clericalism.
feature in any discussion of violence and democracy, for at least four

reasons. Fed by public inquiries, judicial reviews, funerals and truth
commissions, public spheres have a propensity to overcome denials
and cover-ups by cultivating shared memories of times past when ter-
rible things were done to people; a powerful example was the symbolic
burial (in 2001) of Ken Saro-Wiwa, attended by 200,000 mourners ded-
icated to remembering the human rights activist who had been exe-
cuted by the Nigerian junta. Public spheres also heighten citizens’ and
governments’ awareness of the nature and extent of actually existing
incivilities. Furthermore, they canvass and circulate to other citizens
ethical judgements about whether or not (or under what conditions)
a certain form of violence is justified. Finally, public spheres tend to
encourage the formulation of remedies for incivility; not only prag-
matic proposals that are mindful of the complexity of the whole sub-
ject and the troubling implications of violence for democratic insti-
tutions, but also uncompromisingly ‘utopian’ visions of a world no
longer cursed by (certain forms of) violence.34
An eighth rule: carefully examine the ethical processes that
unfold within publics exposed to symbolic representations of vio-
lence; query the commonsense view that actually existing democra-
cies turn violence into pure entertainment. The growth of publics that
worry about violence throws doubt on the customary view that the
growing saturation of everyday life with media-driven images, particu-
larly those depicting acts of violence, implicates audiences who know
no better in a sado-masochistic relationship with that violence. The
customary view is anticipated in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin
34
Such visions can develop illicitly even in contexts in which levels of violence have
reached extraordinary proportions – like those vast areas of occupied Europe in which
Hitler’s armies had conquered, or his allies were in control. Although during World
War II civilian efforts to protect victims and to thwart and sabotage the occupiers’
plans were not strong enough to defeat the enemy, the underground public opin-
ion that they cultivated ensured not only that Nazism and its allies were denied
legitimacy, in the face of terrible crimes, this public opinion also kept alive hopes
for a better future, as has been pointed out by Jacques Semelin, Unarmed Against
Hitler. Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939–1943 (Westport, CT and London 1993),
especially ch. 6.
Fiore’s comments on the Vietnam War as the first-ever media war:

‘The television war has meant the end of the dichotomy between
civilian and military. The public is now participant in every phase
of the war, and the main actions of the war are now being fought
in the American home itself.’35 The title of Jean Baudrillard’s The
Evil Demon of Images hardens this thesis; the old adage that war is
the continuation of politics by violent means needs to be amended,
Baudrillard argues, because media images are now the continuation
of war by other means. War, the most concentrated form of violence,
has become cinematographic and televisual, just as the mechanically
produced image (a film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now,
for instance) makes war on the world by first devouring everything
and everybody in its path during filming, then spewing it out as a
mass spectacle of riveting images of napalm, gassed bodies, burned-out
tanks, screaming jets, explosions, screaming children, stories of rape
and pillage. ‘War becomes film, film becomes war.’ It is still widely
thought that pictures of war bear witness to the world by literally
reproducing it ‘as it really is’. That is not so, Baudrillard insists. The
image, whether photographic, cinematic or televisual, in fact seduces
its producers and consumers by promoting spontaneous confidence in
its own realism. The dirty reality of war is thereby discursively swal-
lowed up into a black hole of images which extinguish all referential-
ity. Basic polarities such as subject/object, private/public, good/evil
and the imaginary/the real are made to implode. War becomes unques-
tionable. Images of violence cease to have a transcendent meaning;
they are simply violence as it actually exists. Audiences are seduced
and captured and held hostage by such images; images of violence fill
them with ‘a kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy in images,
a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social
or political judgements’.36
35
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (Corte
Madera, CA 2001 [1968]), p. 134.
36
Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Sydney 1998). Such claims seem to
belong less to media analysis than to the world of fictional literature. It is as if
Enzensberger’s Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg replicates the

same thesis. Television has become ‘a single huge piece of graffiti’
which serves up massacre as mass entertainment. Acts of violence
in Sarajevo, Kigali, Baghdad, Belfast and elsewhere in effect func-
tion as ‘a horror movie with its own blood-and-guts productions’.
Scenes of broken-hearted refugees, raped and ravaged by pitched bat-
tles that rage in distant countries, and footage of desperate violence
within the broken-down hearts of sophisticated cities, are not treated
with the gravity or sophistication they deserve. They become light
entertainment.
Quite aside from its neglect of the growth of variously sized pub-
lic spheres, the thesis is extravagant – and implausible – for several
reasons. If the violence-as-mass-entertainment theory were literally
true, then it is unclear how the apocalyptic theory itself could explain
how it has emerged unscathed from a world in which all meaning has
become enveloped within the mass media. If the theory were literally
true, if in other words it was not a deliberately exaggerated provo-
cation, then it is also unclear what should be done about the phe-
nomenon, except, supposing its undesirability, to ban all mass media
reportage of violence (a possible recommendation that might well be
implied by Enzensberger’s call for citizens to forget about the wider
world and to concentrate upon the forms of uncivil war closest to
home). The thesis also says nothing about the growth of civility asso-
ciated with what Elias called the modern civilising process; it takes
no account of the survival and flourishing of secular forms of the
uncanny; and it rests as well upon an unspoken assumption about
the nitwit nature of the viewing audience. It supposes that audiences
are hapless and gullible idiots. They are presumed to be incapable of
interpreting or reinterpreting images of violence, even those which are
contemporary audiences resemble James Joyce’s everyman character, Leopold

Bloom, who feels he ‘must eat’ while walking the streets of Dublin, and so enters
a restaurant, thinking: ‘Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always
needed. Insidious. Lick it up, smoking hot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts. Ah, I’m
hungry’ (James Joyce, Ulysses (New York 1934 (1914)), p. 169.
presented with explanations of their origins, causes and ethical impli-

cations. At most, audiences are presumed to be capable of catharsis,
or gross satisfaction in the misfortune of others.
The presumption that audiences are feeble-minded misan-
thropes flies in the face of considerable counter-evidence, past and
present. Democracies or polities on the road to democratisation have
a long history of cultivating works of art and entertainment that often
proved painful to audiences because they were shocking in their por-
trayal of violence in all its wrenching and disgusting complexity. Who
today does not wince when reading the account in Huckleberry Finn of
a run-down Arkansas town where the local sport consists in dowsing
a stray dog with turpentine and setting it alight? Or feel uncomfort-
able in the presence of Hemingway’s description of putrescent corpses
‘in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where their
mouths have been’? Or the revulsion induced by reading Jean Giono’s
account of the 1914–18 trenches:
The dead lay face down in the mud, or emerged from shell holes,
peacefully, their hands on the edges of the holes, their heads
resting on their arms. The rats came and sniffed them. They
hopped from one to another. They chose the young ones first,
those without beards on their cheeks. They sniffed their cheeks,
then they settled down and began to eat the flesh between the nose
and the mouth, then the edges of the lips, then the unripe apples
of the cheeks. From time to time they passed their paws through
their whiskers to clean them. As for the eyes, they got them out
with little taps of their paws and licked out the eye-sockets; then
they bit into the eyes, as if they were little eggs, and chewed them
gently, their heads on one side, sucking out the juice.37
Today, audiences still often experience moral revulsion at the

violent images with which they are confronted. They also take steps
to turn away from such images, or they avoid them as far as possible.
37
Jean Giono, Le grand troupeau (Paris 1951), pt. 2, sect. 3.
They also often draw their own conclusions, usually by talking with
others about the programme format and the ‘story’ itself, as well as
the pros and cons of the violence in question.
The violence-as-entertainment thesis supposes that visual rep-
resentations of incivility are seamless texts that always overwhelm
those who sit still before them – dissolving ‘the audience’ into a
fictional nothingness. That rarely happens, not only for empirical
reasons (bitter controversies about violence still abound) but also
because the different types of textual representation of violence on
offer to audiences guarantee different types of audience response.
Some texts about violence are state-centred and subject heavily to
censorship; others are more or less journalist-centred or produced
from the points of view of the perpetrators or victims of violence;
and still others may be an eclectic mixture of some or all of these
possibilities. Not only that, but within each of these types of rep-
resentation of violence there is an observable ‘intention of the text’
(as Umberto Eco has put it) which tends to codetermine or divine
particular types of responses by the audiences who are exposed to
the images of violence. There is never just one definitive meaning
of any media account of a violent episode, and certainly not that of
the author of that account. There are always plausible or implausible
interpretations of what is communicated, that is, more or less per-
suasive judgements that are pre-structured by the form and content
of the media account itself. Some media narratives, the heavily cen-
sored British television coverage of the Malvinas War, for example,
encourage flag-waving and the glorification of violence by their audi-
ences. Other narratives, for instance slick televisual news coverage
of a rape or murder in the local community, may induce paralysing
shock or puzzlement or sickening depression that serves to contain an
audience’s responses within strictly defined limits. Still other nar-
ratives suppose that by so shocking their audiences they can be
encouraged to empathise with the violated – to engage not merely in
‘understanding’ the violated but also to ‘overstand’ the narratives, that
is, to engage in a kind of questioning of the facts behind the facts of the
violence that the narratives themselves do not encourage audiences to

ask.
Media narratives that highlight representations of resistance to
violence are a case in point of the latter possibility. Televisual images
of uncivil war zones, for instance, never simply highlight the destruc-
tiveness of violence. We see not only burning, looting, killing, rubbled
buildings and piles of bloodied bodies. We see as well images of the first
green shoots of civil society: shoes being fashioned from the tires of a
bombed-out car; a woman looking through rubbish tips for rags to use
as nappies; a postman who appears from nowhere; a priest gathering
around him ragged-trousered, rapscallion youth to set up a car repair
workshop in a ramshackle shed next to his war-damaged church.
Less obvious are those diffuse or more subtle forms of resis-
tance evidenced on the screen, including the independent reporter/
journalist, whose face shows sign of stress and whose voice connotes
bravery and empathy with the victims. Then there is the silence of the
victims of violence, the eerie stillness of those whose violation can-
not be spoken of, let alone described; and, linked somehow to their
silence, their cries, voiceless cries which are evidently addressed to
no one and everyone. The cries of the violated, no matter where they
are located on the face of the earth, have never been transmitted so
frequently or so widely to such large audiences as they are nowa-
days. Some of them – like Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of the naked
girl screaming while fleeing from her napalmed village in Vietnam, or
Kenneth Jarecke’s 1991 image of an Iraqi soldier burned to death on
the road to Basra – have become iconic. The cries of the violated have
uncertain effects, to be sure. Those who break through the silence
imposed by violence never know whether their cries will be heard,
let alone understood. But, arguably, that is why their cries can be so
powerful. Crying exceeds all language, not only in the primeval sud-
denness with which it breaks the silence surrounding the violence that
has been perpetrated, but also in its militant disregard for the grammar
of language. Crying never comes to a halt, as if it were reduced to gib-
berish. It stands outside the boundaries of linguistic sense. It echoes
in the ears of those who hear, its meanings infinitely suspended and
never fully decipherable. Crying cries out indefinitely to be heard, to
be understood, to be remedied.
The crying of those who have been violated sometimes – or
often – triggers questions about responsibility among those who see or
hear the grief of those who cry. Why and to what extent such a conver-
sion process takes place remains something of an enigma to political
analysts, and to publics at large. Empathy with the violated happens,
but why and when and for how long remains utterly unpredictable.
All that is known is that it happens, and – contrary to the violence-as-
entertainment thesis – to the extent that it does happen we can speak
of a potentially civilising dialectic hidden within the growing media
coverage of virtually all forms of violence. Communications media
encourage those who witness violence to have a sense of responsibil-
ity for the fate of the violated – to participate in the politics of pity.
The act of witnessing violence through the media can be accompanied
by several emotions, of which not only denial (‘I am not responsible
for these horrors’) and helpless confusion (‘What can I possibly do?’)
but also humility and guilt and shame are significant possibilities.
Rule number nine: for the sake of democracy, canvass support
everywhere for the civil virtues, the greatest of which is humility.
Understood as a political strategy and as a whole way of life, non-
violence is no good unless it is durable. It cannot be so unless the insti-
tutions of civil society, in which non-violent power-sharing among dif-
ferent groups is routinely practised, under the protection of publicly
accountable government, are lubricated by the ‘pre-political’ juices of
virtue. Those who think that talk of virtues is old-fashioned, or that it
is as moralising as a killjoy neo-conservative rounding on those who
like sex, and other freedoms, need to think again. Benedetto Croce’s
well-known warning that those who engage in politics should learn
to respect the power of the non-political, applies especially to democ-
racies, which require more than respect for the law, freedom of com-
munication and periodic elections in order to function well. They also
need democratically virtuous citizens.
Virtues are the substructure of a peaceable democracy. There

are of course many great democratic virtues – among them truthful-
ness, mercy, tolerance, courage – but the cardinal democratic virtue is
humility. Humility is a friend of democracy because it refuses to put
itself and other virtues on a pedestal; to be proud of certain virtues,
including one’s own or others’ humility, is to suffer from a lack of it.
Although often symbolised by the quiet and boring person of modest
upbringing, humility should not be confused with docility or submis-
siveness. Nietzsche insisted that humility is the morality of slaves,
and therefore deserves nothing but contempt. ‘Humility [humilitas]
is sadness born of the fact that a man considers his own lack of power,
or weakness’, wrote Spinoza, but both he and Nietzsche provide mis-
leading accounts of humility.38 The humble are not necessarily pri-
vate, insignificant or inconspicuous individuals – mere subjects who
will never become rulers, or who die without leaving any other mark
on the world except a few belongings and (if they are lucky) a grave.
Humility is neither meekness nor lowliness (what Aristotle called
micropsuchia) nor servility. Humility is in fact the antithesis of arro-
gant pride; it is the quality of being aware of one’s limits.
Humility has an allergic reaction to the self-satisfied Hobbesian
rule homo homini lupus est (man is a wolf to men). It does not sup-
pose it to be the starting point for understanding modern politics and
international relations. Those who are humble are without illusions.
They dislike vanity and have an affinity with honesty; bullshit on
thrones is not their scene. Humble human beings feel themselves to
be dwellers on earth (humus, from which the word humility derives).
They know that they do not know everything, that they are not God,
or a god or goddess. Humility is a vital resource that strengthens the
powerless and tames the powerful by questioning their claims to supe-
riority. It is the opposite of haughty hunger for power over others,
38
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in the Complete Works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy (London 1964), vol. XII, aphorism 260, p. 229; and Benedict
de Spinoza, The Ethics, in Edwin Curley (ed.), A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and
Other Works (Princeton, NJ 1994), vol. III, definition 26, p. 192.
which is why humility balks at humiliation. In a world of arrogance

tinged with violence, humility emboldens. Unyielding, it gives indi-
viduals inner strength to act upon the world. It dislikes hubris. It
yearns for its dethronement. Humility detests violence and the violent
who, for a time, always suppose that they are right. Humility shuns
showy arrogance and all forms of aggressiveness. Humility radiates in
the presence of others, calmly and cheerfully – it is a social virtue –
enabling them to ‘be themselves’. It does not demand reciprocity. It
implies equality. It is generous. Augustine wrote: ‘Wherever there is
humility there is also charity.’ Descartes agreed: ‘the most generous
people are usually also the most humble.’39 Aimed at the haughty
and the bossy, humility implies tolerance, and since it shuns abusive
power it anticipates a more equal and tolerant – and less violent –
world. The humble live off the simple conviction that the world to
which they aspire is better than the world in which they are forced to
dwell.
The final rule for ridding the world of surplus violence:
democrats should eschew guilt and instead be prepared publicly
to experience shame for the violence that has been perpetrated in
past and present struggles to defend or to abolish democracy. In the
English vernacular, these two tiny words – guilt and shame – are nor-
mally confused. The markedly different dispositions they signify nev-
ertheless should be distinguished within any account of the tense
relationship between violence and democracy.40
Guilt, the feeling of culpability for another’s misfortune, the
emotional obsession with having done something wrong to them, is
unproductive of a mature, democratic sense of responsibility for the
39
Augustine’s remark is cited in the entry ‘Humilité’, in Xavier Léon-Dufour et al.
(ed.), Vocabulaire de théologie biblique (Paris 1970); René Descartes, Les passions
de l’âme (Paris 1937 [1645–9]), pt. 3, art. 155, p. 102.
40
I am relying here on the suggestive formulations of Herbert Morris, ‘Guilt and
shame’, in On Guilt and Innocence (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1976); Gabriele
Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt (Oxford 1985); and Bernard Williams, Shame and
Necessity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1993), especially ch. 4.
fate of those who have been violated. Those who are rendered guilty
by the act of witnessing (or committing) violence against others are
gripped by the feeling that they could easily disappear into a hole,
chased by the anger, resentment or indignation of the violated. Even
though their actions may not have directly caused the suffering of the
violated, the guilty feel as they do because an inner voice tells them
that they are indeed responsible. The guilty are haunted by the sound
within themselves of the voice of judgement. They feel permanent
regret at what they have done to others. That is why they themselves
often fear retaliatory punishment, or even inflict it upon themselves,
for instance by means of permanently deep-seated guilt.
In practice, the accomplices and witnesses of incivility often
mix together the emotions of guilt and shame, but that does not void
the distinction between them. Shame understandably arises in both
the audiences and perpetrators when witnessing scenes of violence,
but not simply because it is an emotion often connected with the
process of seeing and being seen. Unlike the experience of guilt, in
which the ego is neurotically haunted and paralysed by the cries and
blood of the violated, shame is initially the emotion of self-protection,
in which the whole being of the shamed person seems diminished, but
not obliterated.
When experiencing shame, audiences and perpetrators are
struck by their feeling of exposure to the violated, who themselves
are often less angry and resentful (as in guilt) than contemptuous,
derisive or dismissive of those who witness or inflict their plight. It
is as if those who cry out, or bleed, are looking back at those who are
watching and can see right through them, even though the audience
or the perpetrators themselves are seated in safety, before a control
panel, or far away in the comfort of living rooms and theatres. Those
who feel shame feel exposed to the wrong people at the wrong time.
Consequently, they are gripped by the desire to hide, or to hide their
faces, even the desire to switch off their television sets, or (like the
first American cinema audiences to witness footage of concentration
camp victims and survivors41 ) to skulk from the room.42 They feel
shame not so much because of what they purportedly have done (as
in guilt) but because they are gripped by the intuition that the vio-
lence they have committed or witnessed falls contemptibly short of
the civilised standards they expect of themselves and others in the
world around them. Unlike the guilty, who wallow in their own guilt,
those who are ashamed, not surprisingly, often yearn to recover or
to improve themselves, even to bond or interact with the violated.
Caught with their pants down, the ashamed seek to decipher what
has happened to the violated and to understand themselves in rela-
tion to what has happened – sometimes for the purpose of rebuilding
both themselves and the world in which they and their offspring have
to live their future lives.
It is of interest that one of the first great twentieth-century nov-
els about power and violence, Kafka’s The Trial, ends with the theme
of shame and not guilt. It might have been expected that the death
scene, in which two officials stab Joseph K. twice through the heart in
a deserted moonlit quarry, constitutes the pardon, the end of the inter-
minable ordeal for the victim. Kafka refuses that ending by specifying
that the shame of it all survives. ‘Like a dog’, the victim splutters,
vomiting out his last words, as if he meant the shame of his mur-
der to outlive him, and to haunt posterity forever. The whole scene
is depressing, but here in literary form, surely, is a clue to one of
the vital emotional responses required of all thinking, judging, act-
ing democrats to the plagues and images of violence that blight their
lives. What will posterity remember democracies for? Propping up
dictators and having tea with totalitarians? The invention of concen-
tration camps and escape-proof prisons? Or the napalm bombs they
41
Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: America and the Liberation of the Nazi
Concentration Camps (New York 1985), p. 170.
42
Compare the remarks of Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd edn (New York
1963), pp. 252–3: ‘Shame supposes that one is completely exposed and conscious of
being looked at . . . One is visible and not ready to be visible; which is why we dream
of shame as a situation in which we are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress.’
dropped on innocent civilians, the cities they fire-bombed and the

nuclear explosions they first triggered? Or will posterity recall how
democracies turned rapes and murders into light entertainment? Or
the times when they did nothing and turned a blind eye to orgies of
genocidal blood-letting? Or terrorised the world by declaring war on
world-wide terror? How should democracies today come to terms with
all this violence, all this hypocrisy? Should they not feel ashamed of
what we and our forebears have done to ourselves and to others – in
the name of democracy?
Further reading
The recent history of philosophical and political reflections on violence forms a

rich collage of conflicting and converging insights. A number of these remain vital
in any assessment of the contours of contemporary violence. Readers who remain
unsatisfied with the material cited in this essay, or who are interested in deepening
their understanding of the subject, may wish to consult the following additional
literature on violence written by specialists in various scholarly disciplines. For
her generous help in the preparation of both this list and the index that follows,
I wish to thank Maria Fotou.
Adler, Alfred, ‘La Guerre et l’état primitif’, in Miguel Abensour, ed., L’Esprit des lois
sauvages: Pierre Clastres ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique, Paris 1987.
Anderson, John K., Military Practice and Theory in the Age of Xenophon, Berkeley,
CA. 1970.
Besteman, Catherine, ed., Violence: A Reader, Basingstoke 2002.
Betts, R. K., ‘Nuclear Weapons and Conventional War’, Journal of Strategic Studies
11 (March 1988), pp. 79–95.
Blok, Anton, Honour and Violence, Cambridge 2001.
Bonet, Honoré, The Tree of Battles, Liverpool 1949.
Buruma, Ian, The Wages of Guilt. Memories of War in Germany and Japan, London
1995.
Buzan, Barry, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies
in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd edn, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo
and Singapore 1991.
Caffi, Andrea, ‘Violence and Sociability’, Politics, 4, 1 (January 1947), pp. 16–19.
Caillois, Roger, ‘Le Vertige de la guerre’, in Quatre essais de sociologie contempo-
raine, Paris 1951.
Calvocoressi, Peter and Guy Wint, Total War, London 1972.
Campbell, David and Michael Dillon, eds., The Political Subject of Violence,
Manchester 1993.
Cassese, Antonio, Violence and Law in the Modern Age, Cambridge 1988.
Ceadl, Martin, The Origins of War Prevention. The British Peace Movement and
International Relations, 1730–1854, Oxford 1996.
f u r t h e r r e a d i n g 211
Cipolla, Carlo M., Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion 1500–
1700, London 1965.
von Clausewitz, Carl, On War, M. Howard and P. Paret, eds., Princeton, NJ 1976.
Colas, Dominique, Civil Society and Fanaticism. Conjoined Histories, Stanford
1997.
Covington, Coline, et al., eds., Terrorism and War: Unconscious dynamics of polit-
ical violence, London 2002.
Crichton, John, ed., Psychiatric Patient Violence. Risk and Response, London 1995.
Duby, Georges, The Chivalrous Society, Berkeley, CA 1977.
Dershowitz, Alan M., Why Terrorism Works, New Haven and London 2002.
Elias, Norbert, The Loneliness of the Dying, Oxford and Cambridge, MA 1985.
Elias, Norbert and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement. Sport and Leisure in the
Civilizing Process, Oxford and Cambridge, MA 1993.
Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War, Chicago and London 1995.
Finer, Samuel E, ‘State and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military’,
in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe,
Princeton, NJ 1975.
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, London 1977.
Freedman, Lawrence, ed., Superterrorism. Policy Responses. Oxford 2002.
Gelles, Richard J., ‘Physical violence, child abuse, and child violence: a continuum
of violence, or distinct behaviours?’, Human Nature, 2, 1 (1991), pp. 59–72.
Girard, René, Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, MD 1977.
‘Generative violence and the extinction of social order’, Salmagundi, 63–4
(Spring–Summer 1984), pp. 204–37.
Gray, J. Glenn, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, New York 1970.
Halbrook, Stephen P., That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional
Right, Albuquerque, NM 1984.
Hale, John, ‘War and Public Opinion in Renaissance Italy’, in E. R. Jacob, ed., Italian
Renaissance Studies, New York 1960.
Hartogs, Renatus, and Eric Artzt, eds., Violence: Causes and Solutions, New York
1970.
Hassner, Pierre, ‘Beyond the three traditions: the philosophy of war and peace in
historical perspective’, International Affairs, 70, 4 (1994), pp. 737–56.
Howard, Michael, War in European History, Oxford 1976.
Huizinga, Johan, ‘The political and military significance of chivalric ideas in the
late Middle Ages’, in Men and Ideas. History, the Middle Ages, the Renais-
sance. Essays by Johan Huizinga, New York 1959.
Jünger, Ernst, Im Stahlgewittern, Berlin 1931.
Kaldor, Mary, The Baroque Arsenal, New York 1982.
212 f u r t h e r r e a d i n g
Keane, John, ‘Despotism and democracy. The origins and development of the dis-
tinction between civil society and the state, 1750–1850’, in John Keane, ed.,
Civil Society and the State. New European Perspectives, London and New
York 1988.
Keen, Maurice, Chivalry, New Haven 1984.
Kelman, Herbert C., ‘Violence without moral restraint: reflections on the dehu-
manization of victims and victimizers’, Journal of Social Issues, 29, 4 (1973),
pp. 25–61.
Kendrick, Walter, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment, New York
1991.
Leiden, Carl, and Karl M. Schmitt, The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the
Modern World, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1968.
Lemarchand, René, Burundi. Ethnocide as Discourse and Practice, Cambridge
1994.
Lindqvist, Sven, A History of Bombing, London 2001.
McCulloch, Jock, Black Soul, White Artifact. Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and
Social Theory, Cambridge and New York 1983.
McMahan, Jeff, The Ethics of Killing. Problems at the Margins of Life, Oxford 2002.
Malcolm, Joyce Lee, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American
Right, Cambridge, MA 1994.
Mallett, Michael, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy,
London 1974.
Mansfield, Edward D., and Jack Snyder, ‘Democratization and War’, Foreign Affairs,
74, 3 (May–June 1995), pp. 79–97.
Marx, Gary T., Undercover: Police Surveillance in America, New York 1988.
Civil Disorder and the Agents of Social Control, Irvington 1993.
Mier, Paul, John Keane and Alberto Melucci, ‘New perspectives on social move-
ments: an interview’, in John Keane and Paul Mier, eds., Nomads of the Present,
London and Philadelphia 1989.
Minear Larry, and Thomas G. Weiss, Mercy Under Fire. War and the Global
Humanitarian Community, Boulder, CO, San Francisco and Oxford 1995.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘Violence et violence’, Lignes, 25 (May 1995), pp. 293–8.
Paret, Peter, Understanding War. Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military
Power, Princeton, NJ 1992.
Phillipson, Coleman, The International Law and Custom of Ancient Greece and
Rome, London 1911.
Pick, Daniel, War Machine. The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age,
New Haven and London 1993.
f u r t h e r r e a d i n g 213
Preston, R. A., S. F. Wise, and H. O. Werner, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare

and its Interrelationships with Western Society, London 1956.
Robarchek, Clayton A., ‘Primitive warfare and the ratomorphic image of mankind’,
American Anthropologist, 91 (1989), pp. 903–20.
Ruff, Julius R., Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800, Cambridge 2001.
Schwoerer, Lois G., ‘No Standing Armies!’ The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth
Century England, Baltimore, MD 1974.
Searles, Patricia, and Ronald J. Berger, eds., Rape and Society. Readings on the
Problem of Sexual Assault, Boulder, CO, San Francisco and Oxford 1995.
Silberner, Edmond, La Guerre dans la pensée économique du XVI au XVIII siècle,
Paris 1939.
Singh, Birinder Pal, Violence as Political Discourse, Shimla 2002.
Steger, Manfred B., and Nancy S. Lind, eds., Violence and its Alternatives,
Basingstoke 1999.
Toynbee, Arnold J., War and Civilization, London, New York and Toronto 1951.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ed., Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne, Paris 1968.
Waltz, Kenneth N., Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis, New York
1959.
Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illus-
trations, New York 1977.
Wheeler, Nick, Saving Strangers. Humanitarian Intervention in International
Society, Oxford and New York 2000.
Whitmer, Barbara, The Violence Mythos, Albany, NY 1997.
Wolfner, Glenn D. and Richard J. Gelles, ‘A profile of violence towards children: a
national study’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 17 (1993), pp. 197–212.
Wolin, Sheldon, ‘Violence and the Western political tradition’, American Journal
of Orthopsychiatry, 33 (1963), pp. 15–28.
Worcester, Kenton, et al., eds., Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox,
New York 2002.
Index
Akihiko, Tanaka 19, 177 A Letter to John Farr and John Harris,
Al-Fanjari, Ahmad Shawqi 183, 188 Esqrs., Sheriffs of the City of
Al-hurriyat’ as-siyasiyyah fi’l Islam 184 Bristol, on the Affairs of America
Al-Ghannouchi, Rachid 183, 188, 189, 191 122
‘The efficiency of using violence to
establish an Islamic State’ 184 Carmichael, Stokely 11
‘The Islamic movement and violence’ Castoriadis, Cornelius 88
184 China 20, 23
Althusius, Johannes 116, 190 civil society 4, 42–3, 96–9
Politica Methodice digesta atque Ernest Gellner on 43–5
exemplis sacris et profanis ilustrata incompatibility of violence with 38
116 its role in American Revolution 144–6
American Revolution 144–6 rebuilding civil society 129, 130–2
Battle of Trenton 145–6 civil war 25, 112–13
anti-party politics 150–3 civilisation see ‘civilisation’ passim 42–52,
apocalyptic terrorism see terrorism 53
Arendt, Hannah 6, 7, 12, 100, 118, 146 civilising process according to Elias
Correspondence 1926–1969 (with Karl 55–6 see civility
Jaspers) 79 civility 3, 56
On Violence 6, 7, 100, 146 Zygmunt Bauman on 66–7
The Origins of Totalitarianism 98 Samuel Johnson on 42
Aristotle 38–9, 205 and modern state 60–2
on violence 38–9 civility politics 82, 90
Politica 38 civilising process according to Elias 55–6
Aron, Raymond 21, 111 dialectics of 105
Le grand schisme 111 rebuilding civil society 129, 130–2
Les dernières années du siècle 163 Clastres, Pierre 115
Augustine 11, 206 Recherches d’anthropologie politique
Aung, San Suu Kyi 155 116
Clausewitz, Carl von 22, 74, 116, 181
Baudrillard, Jean 199 Conrad, Joseph 10
The Evil Demon of Images 199 Council of Europe 80–1
Bauman, Zygmunt 65, 82 Croce, Benedetto 204
Modernity and the Holocaust 65
on civility 66–7 Darnton, Robert 31, 33
Benjamin, Walter 12 The Great Cat Massacre and Other
Zur Kritik der Gewalt 12 Episodes in French Cultural
Bergson, Henri-Louis 149 History 33
Bin Laden, Osama 11 De Vitoria, Francisco 19
Brecht, Bertolt 138 democracy 1
Burke, Edmund 119–20, 122 and Islamic politics 183–91
i n d e x 215
democratic virtues 204–6 Erasmus of Rotterdam 56

democratic zones of peace 8, 18 (see also ethics 128–64
democratic peace, theory of) European Union 78, 176
means of violence 2
restraining violence 160–2 Fadlallah, Sayyed Muhammed 189
tendency to democratise violence 2–4, Fanon, Frantz 13, 143
30–1, 75–6 Les Damnés de la terre 13
democratic opposition in Eastern Europe see Peau Noire, masques blancs 143
anti-party politics fascism 2
democratic peace, theory of 17–18 Ferguson, Adam 52, 54
democratic zones of peace 17, 18 An Essay on the History of Civil Society
zones of violent anarchy 17 53
democratic virtues 204–6 on civilisation 52–3
democratic zones of peace 8, 17, 18 see also Forster, Georg 51
democratic peace, theory of Foucault, Michel 37
democratisation of violence 2–4, 30–1, 32–3, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the
75–88 Prison 37, 57
ten rules 165–209 Freud, Sigmund 104
Derrida, Jacques 11, 169–70 The Uncanny (das Unheimliche) 104
Descartes, René 206
Les passions de l’âme 206 Galtung, Johan 34, 35
détente 85–6 ‘Cultural violence’ 35
Diderot, Denis 49 ‘Violence, peace and peace research’ 35
Dunbar, James 54 Gandhi, Mahatma 49, 155
Essays on the History of Mankind in Non-Violent Resistance 155
Rude and Cultivated Ages 54 Gay, Peter 93
The Cultivation of Hatred. The
Eco, Umberto 19, 177 Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to
‘Living in the new Middle Ages’ 20 Freud 93
neo-medieval order 19–20, 102 Gellner, Ernest 43–5
Elias, Norbert 55, 58–60, 82, 91, 96 Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and
civilising process 55–6, 62 its Rivals 43–5
civilising process and the modern state Muslim Society 115
61 Gilligan, James 168
on civility and violence 62 Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest
Über den Prozess der Zivilization. Epidemic 168
Soziogenetische und Gingrich, Newt 107
psychogenetische Untersuchungen Girard, René 8–10, 11, 13, 26, 188
55–6 La violence et le sacré 8–10, 13, 26
‘Violence and civilisation. The state Le Bouc émissaire 188
monopoly of physical violence and Violences d’aujourd’hui, violence de
its infringement’ 63 toujours 8
Eliot, T. S. 109, 121 Graham, Franklin 183
Elser, Georg 163 Greene, Graham 166
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 113, 134–5, 165 guerrillas 27
Aussichten auf den Burgerkrieg 114,
135, 199–200 Hassner, Pierre 21, 111
‘Der Krieg, wie’ 138 La Violence et la paix. De la bombe
on uncivil war and intervention 134–5, atomique au nettoyage ethnique
136–7 21, 111
216 i n d e x
Hobbes, Thomas 62, 82, 92, 113, 122, 159 Levi, Primo 54
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Lévi-Strauss, Claude 64
Power of a Common-Wealth Logan, John 54
Ecclesiastical and Civill 93 Elements of the Philosophy of History
Philosophical Rudiments concerning 54
Government and Society 93
The History of The Causes of The Civil Machiavelli, Niccolò 94, 116
Wars of England, and of The The Prince 94, 116
Counsels and Artifices By Which Mao, Zedong 11
They Were Carried On From The Marx, Karl 10, 95–6
Year 1640 To The Year 1660 110 on civil society 95–6
Hook, Sydney 33 McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin 198
Hume, David 120 War and Peace in the Global Village 199
‘Of public credit’ 120 Melville, Herman 5
Michels, Robert 148
incivility 46–53, 91–2, 97 and ‘civilisation’ Michnik, Adam 1, 151
42–53 Miller, Arthur 98
India 23 The Misfits 98
intervention 19, 129 see also Enzensberger Milošević, Slobodan 26
Islamic politics 183–91 Mirabeau, Comte de 49, 94
L’Ami des Hommes ou Traité de la
James, William 94 population 49, 94
‘The moral equivalent of war’ 94 Montesquieu, Baron de 147
Johnson, Samuel 42 Muchembled, Robert 31
on civility 42 on the role of violence 31
Jünger, Ernst 16, 122 La Violence au village: sociabilité et
In Stahlgewittern 122 comportements populaires en
Artois du XVe au XVIIe siècle 31
Kafka, Franz 38
The Penal Colony 38 national sovereignty, the end of 15, 19
The Trial 208 neo-medieval order 19–20, 102
Kant, Immanuel 91 ‘new middle ages’ see neo-medieval order
‘Welchen Ertrag wird der Fortschritt and under Eco, Sacco
zum besseren dem Niebuhr, Reinhold 6
Menschengeschiecht abwerfen?’ 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich 205
Kaplan, Robert 113, 115 Beyond Good and Evil 165, 205
‘The coming anarchy’ 114 non-governmental organisations 132–3 see
Khaldun, Ibn 11, 189 also civil society
The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to Novalis 49
History 189 nuclear weapons 15–16
King, Martin Luther 154, 155 as a threat to national sovereignty 15
‘Letter from the Birmingham City Jail’ first side of the triangle of violence
154, 155 20–4
Koselleck, Reinhart 90 in the post-Cold War world system
Kritik und Krise. Eine Studie zur 20–4
Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt Singer and Wildavsky 72–3
90
Orwell, George 15, 128, 156
League of Nations 78 ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ 156
Lenin, Vladimir I. 11 ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ 15
i n d e x 217
pacifism 154–8 Sudan 24

Paine, Thomas 145 Swift, Jonathan 47, 51
The American Crisis 145 A Modest Proposal for Preventing the
Pakistan 23 Children of Poor People in Ireland
Palach, Jan 139 from being a Burden to their
Pascal 170 Parents or Country; and for making
Patočka, Jan 87 them beneficial to the Publick 51,
peace movements 83 137
British peace movement 83–4, 87–8 The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift
Philadelphian model, the 76–7 48
Plato 89
The Republic 89, 180 terrorism 27–9
Polybius 89 apocalyptic terrorism (as the third
The General History of Polybius 89 side of the triangle of violence)
post-war reconstruction see rebuilding civil 27–9
society classical form 27–8
pragmatism 7 Toch, Hans 168
public spheres 195–8 The Disturbed and Violent Offender
(with Kenneth Adams) 168
Qutb, Sayyid 185 Toqueville, Alexis de 148
Torture Committee 81
rebuilding civil society 129, 130–2 totalitarianism 67
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 49–50, 61 triangle of violence, the 20–9
Considérations sur le gouvernement de first side of 20–4
Pologne, et sur sa réformation second side of 24–7
projetée 180–1 third side of 27–9
‘Fragments of an Essay on the State of
War’ 50 uncivil society see incivility
Russian Federation 20, 22 uncivil war 24–7, 114–15, 117–19
as the second side of the triangle of
Sacco, Giuseppe 19 violence 24–7
neo-medieval order 19–20, 102 defining uncivil 109
Sartre, Jean-Paul 11 destructiveness of 119–20
Schmitt, Carl 82 uncivil war zones 25–6 see also
Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Enzensberger
Thomas Hobbes 82 United Nations, the 78
Semprun, Jorge 167 United States of America 20, 22
The Long Voyage 167
Shklar, Judith 6, 7 Van Creveld, Martin 114, 115
Singer, Max and Wildavsky, Aaron 18, 72–3 The Transformation of War 114
The Real World Order: Zones of Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 175
Peace/Zones of Turmoil 18, 72–3 La Torture dans la République: essai
Smith, Adam 52 d’histoire et de politique
Sorel, Georges 12, 30 contemporaines (1954–1962) 175
Réflexions sur la violence 12, 147–50, violence 6
151 against animals 31
Spinoza, Benedict de 205 and civil society 42–3
The Ethics 205 and Islamic politics 183–91
Starkweather case 101 and modern state 60–2
Suárez, Francisco 19 and public spheres 195–8
218 i n d e x
violence (cont.) ‘just violence’ 11

as a natural element of human legitimate use of 12
nature/affairs 7–11 on defining violence 30–40
as an ‘ideal-type’ 30 restraining violence 160–2
as entertainment 102–5, 198–200 self-violence 139–41
collective violence 142 state violence 54–65
connections with democracy 1 triangle of violence, the 20–9
democratisation of 2–4, 30–1, 32–3, Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 50
75–88, 165–209 Von Kleist, Heinrich 99
embodied quality of 36
ethics of violence 128–64 Walzer, Michael 13
fascination in Weimar Germany 103 Just and Unjust Wars 13
global report on 7–8 war crimes tribunals 78–80
humiliation and violence 101–2 Ward, Janie 163
in fascist regimes 2 Weber, Max 158
in the twentieth century 16 ‘Politik als Beruf’ 158
incompatibility with civil society 38, Weil, Simone 142, 151
62 Wolf, Christa 181
institutional violence 37 Wolff, Robert Paul 33
intentional component of 35 ‘On violence’ 33

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Violence and Democracy

In this provocative book, John Keane calls for a fresh understanding

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster.

Other books in the series

Cambridge University Press

© John Keane 2004

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

First published in print format 2004

isbn-13 978-0-511-21080-8 eBook (EBL)

isbn-13 978-0-521-83699-9 hardback

isbn-13 978-0-521-54544-0 paperback

Introduction: surplus violence page 1

6 Uncivil wars 109

8 Ten rules for democratising violence 165

Further reading 210

As a rule, dictatorships guarantee safe streets and the terror of the

Adam Michnik (1998)

Just how unique contemporary democracies are when deﬁning

disappeared begin; clandestine mass graves are exhumed; citizens are

less taken-for-granted commitments: conversations, gestures, wash-

These antipathies of democracies toward violence are well

of the earth, only to suffer crushing defeat. Fortunately – thanks to

Shklar’s preoccupation with cruelty were the striking exceptions5 –

democracies democratise violence. When democracies ﬂourish, they

companion of human affairs. That is why communities can be pro-

Gripped by this conviction, many observers (René Girard is just

said to be legitimate only when the intention to use it was declared

Frantz Fanon’s attack on white-washing colonialism, Les Damnés de

Today, tragedy is collective.

Albert Camus (1946)

the musket and the bomb

Orwell’s remarks were astute. They grasped the momentous

villagers, mourning their beloved, weeping over the destruction of

taking a violent turn. So too does the development of a global system of

the triangle of violence

arrangement clearly differs from the extended freeze imposed by the

democracies, or those who aspire after a democratic way of life, need

the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, nuclear capacity, as can be

armaments. Talk of ‘throw-weight gaps’, ‘windows of vulnerability’

Uncivil war zones of the Sudanese kind are marked by terrible

advantage. Rivalries, jealousies, quarrels within the community of the

their activities invisible or ‘private’ in order – paradoxically – to win

change of the political order; and each unleashed violence in urban

The problems of violence still remain most obscure

Georges Sorel (1906)

‘violence’ and its negative connotations are now notoriously contested

straightforwardly universal meaning – can be learned by pondering the

personal or group ends’.7 Finally, the term violence should not be

experiences like ‘harm’, ‘misery’, ‘unhappiness’, ‘alienation’, ‘cultural

interference with the bodies of others; their limit or borderline cases,

the status of a profession. But it remains violence, nonetheless. The

moment, before they scream. Sometimes their muteness is forever.

the inevitability of violence within both the pre-political realm of the

of head-phoned youths horsing around? Or the British soldier who

Civility [from civil] . . . Freedom from barbarity; the state of being

Samuel Johnson (1786)

rediscovering civil society

democratic movements opposed to government by violence; the fact