Theme Issue 55

Theorizing Histories of Violence

Cover image: execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794, artist unknown, from Gallica Digital Library (ID: btv1b6950750j).

+ PHILIP DWYER AND JOY DAMOUSI, Theorizing Histories of Violence, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 3-6.

No abstract.

+ PHILIP DWYER, Violence and its Histories: Meanings, Methods, Problems, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 7-22.

Violence has evolved over the past few decades into one of the leading interpretive concepts in history. And yet there few critiques of it to speak of, and no clear-cut methodology on how to do the history of violence. This article takes a more critical view of violence as a field of historical research by questioning some of the approaches and methods adopted until now. It examines some meanings of violence and the difficulties involved in defining it, discusses some of the trends that have emerged from the history of violence, and offers some suggestions about how to approach the topic from a different perspective. It argues for a cultural, constructed interpretation of violence that not only involves understanding behaviors, but also narratives and discourses of violence that help both define and shape people’s attitudes.

+ STUART CARROLL, Thinking with Violence, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 23-43.

This article addresses the assumptions that have underpinned historical writing about violence. It identifies a growing disconnect between mainstream historical practice and a new form of “comfort history” written for a popular audience largely by nonhistorians. It explores the reasons for this disconnect by looking at history’s engagement with four other disciplines: psychology, historical sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology. It concludes by showing what the possibilities are for a more open dialogue between historians and social scientists and scientists.

+ MORTEN OXENBØLL, Epistemologies of Violence: Medieval Japanese War Tales, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 44-59.

Although violence is one of the most primitive means of communication, appropriate aggression is nevertheless something that needs to be learned. But even though scholars of various disciplines agree that violence is deeply embedded in cultural structures, there has been a remarkable lack in scholarship on how the conscious differentiation between appropriate and inappropriate violence is learned through mediated representations of violence. By applying media theories and works on social learning to premodern Japanese material, I argue that mediated violence can create a “safe space” where different forms of violence can be experienced without the physical consequences of real violence. Mediated violence thus serves crucial functions as learning spaces where societal rules and norms can be temporarily suspended, reconfigured, and often reinforced through active experimentation without the danger of bodily harm. Brutal and graphic depictions of violence thus go beyond mere entertainment. By aestheticizing and staging good and bad violence, mediated violence invites its audiences to reflect on and learn from violent episodes. Violent representations reduce the complexities of real-world conflicts, thereby facilitating a process where audiences can make sense of—and create order out of—chaos. Through the use of epistemological theories, I argue that such simplifications are necessary for human cognitive systems to be able to relate to and learn from violence, and that this learning process takes place within a social and collaborative context.

+ PENNY ROBERTS, French Historians and Collective Violence, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 60-75.

French historians and French history have dominated the study of early modern violence. This essay addresses why this is so and what has characterized French historians’ approaches to collective violence in particular, whether in the form of popular revolt, confessional division, or revolutionary violence. It posits that historians are essentially uncomfortable in defending and explaining popular violence in the past, that they ought to address this issue more directly and not to establish too much cultural distance from their subjects in doing so. It concludes with some reflections on approaches to violence in the past and the present, how historians and others talk about and engage with violence, and how its treatment today should inform how historians address the challenges of writing the history of violence in the future.

+ DAN EDELSTEIN, Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 76-96.

As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legitimacy. These revolutions, following the precedent of the French “revolutionary government” (1793–94) and Marx’s model of a “revolution in permanence,” tend to base the authority of their governments on the fulfillment of revolutionary expectations. This creates a political culture in which authority derives from the power to define what these expectations are, and what “revolution” means (much like Hobbes’s sovereign had the power to set the meaning of words). But revolutionary culture does not leave room for Rawlsian pluralism. “There can be no solution to the social problem but mine,” proclaims the revolutionary ideologue in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, expressing the law of the Red Leviathan. Such a system does not allow for loyal opposition. Accordingly, the specter of counterrevolution always hovers above disagreements between fellow revolutionaries. The purge thus becomes the necessary method for settling ideological differences.

+ ENZO TRAVERSO, Totalitarianism between History and Theory, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 97-118.

Born in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, the concept of totalitarianism experienced an uninterrupted succession of metamorphoses and changes throughout the twentieth century, until its last rebirth after September 11, 2001, when it was remobilized in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is an astonishingly plastic, resilient, and inevitably ambiguous concept, insofar as it merges both politics and scholarship, and belongs, with a different meaning, to almost all currents of thought. Born in the political struggle, it shifted successfully to political theory in which, beyond their discrepancies, most of its interpreters defined it as a new form of power that exceeds the classical categories of political theory running from Aristotle to Max Weber—despotism, tyranny, dictatorship—and grounded in a combination of ideology and terror. The migration of this concept to the field of historical studies, however, was much more controversial. Useful in defining the nature and forms of political regimes, and eventually to establish their typology, “totalitarianism” becomes a problematic, limited, not to say useless concept for analyzing their origins, developments, and fall. On the one hand, it favors a selective historical comparison between different political regimes; on the other hand, it simply juxtaposes them, stressing some analogies but neglecting other fundamental dimensions of historical investigation (origins, duration, ideologies, and social basis). This article is a plea for critical use of this category, which implies both a rejection of its recurrent ideological uses and its integration with the achievements of social and cultural history.

+ JOY DAMOUSI, Mothers in War: “Responsible Mothering,” Children, and the Prevention of Violence in Twentieth-Century War, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 119-134.

The key concern of this article is to explore how the history of twentieth-century violence forces us to reflect on how we interpret the acts of those who find themselves attempting to prevent violence, as mothers have done in relation to their children, in the context of violence and atrocity. A focus on mothers and maternity redirects our analysis to gendered aspects of a history of violence and war that do not concentrate solely on bodily violent acts or physical inflictions upon women—crucial as these remain to histories of violence—but shifts the attention to examining women and violence within another aspect: that of women as active agents negotiating violent contexts. It builds on the considerable scholarship that argues that mothers in war have invariably been represented only as victims or spectators in war, and yet they have also demonstrated agency both individually and collectively. This is significant because to ignore this dimension of scholarly endeavor misses an opportunity to write women into histories of violence in ways that complicate their role in war and make them central to the story. To marginalize mothers in the broader canvas of war and violence, as scholarship often does, is also to narrow our focus of understandings of agency and the negotiation of violence itself. I explore these wider questions by focusing on the cataclysmic events of war, in the first instance in the context of a total war in the early twentieth century, the First World War, and in the second—the Greek Civil War—a civil war that took place in mid-century. Although these are vastly different conflicts, they both illuminate the decisions of mothers to attempt to prevent further violence in war, especially in relation to their children, and to highlight the contested notion of “responsible motherhood” in war.

+ JOANNA BOURKE, Theorizing Ballistics: Ethics, Emotions, and Weapons Scientists, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 135-151.

What is violence? This article explores conceptions of violence from the perspective of scientists engaged in weapons research. Ballistics scientists are routinely excluded from the “violent” label on grounds of class, status, education, and emotional comportment. The article analyzes the science of ballistics through the lenses of ethics and emotions. How do scientists justify experiments in ballistics, or the science of designing weapons and other technologies aimed at destroying environments and inflicting wounds (often fatal) and other forms of injury on people and nonhuman animals? In stark contrast to those who analyze weapons development as an objective science and who impart violent agency to autonomous technologies, I situate wound ballistics as a branch of applied moral philosophy. Its practice always involves an “ought.” Although the central job of ballistics scientists is the “effective production of wounds,” this is not regarded as violent, except by their victims, of course. In part, this lacuna is due to an ideological relationship forged between “violence” and particular emotional states. It is also part of a political project defining “the human.”