Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T06:29:00.100Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

33 - Violence, Civil Society and European Civilisation

from Part VII - Representations and Constructions of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2020

Robert Antony
Affiliation:
Guangzhou University
Stuart Carroll
Affiliation:
University of York
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

The control and sublimation of violence is a story that is essential to the idea of modernity and the rise of the West. The ability to control one’s emotions is fundamental to the notion of aristocracy and its right to rule over others. Sixteenth-century Europe saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. It is axiomatic to notions of the civilising process that the new civility progressively tamed and controlled violence during the early modern period. But this is not what happened. There was a significant increase in homicide rates from the mid sixteenth century which peaked in the mid seventeenth century. There was a notable increase in elite violence in particular, as gentlemen transgressed codes of etiquette in order to provoke rivals and demonstrate their social superiority. The invention of civil society at the end of the seventeenth century was a response to the problem of violence. The knowledge that European society had undergone a pacification process over the previous half a century was crucial to the invention of ‘civilisation’, a word first coined in the 1750s. This word and its cognates were crucial to legitimising the European colonial project. The language of civilisation was employed as a euphemism for violence, justifying ethnic cleansing and enslavement, and enabling the perpetrators of violence to distance themselves from their victims.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliographic Essay

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×