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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 May 2010
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 interpretation of the problem of violence and civil society is its more or less secret commitment to an evolutionary or teleological understanding of history as a process of transformation from ‘rude’ societies to ‘civilised’ societies. Although Ferguson worried about the possible relapse into barbarism, 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 potentially removable from significant areas of social and political life. The presumed evolutionary spiral is explicit in the works of Scottish colleagues 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 violence 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.
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