ON VIOLENCE

Can democracies survive this triangle of violence? Can they do anything to attenuate, even eliminate, its globally destructive consequences? 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 violence 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.