“Violence and Civilization: a Deep Historical View”

Clio’s Psyche, 2014

Daedalus, 2007

In this compelling and timely book, Larry Ray offers a wide-ranging and integrated account of the many manifestations of violence in society. He examines violent behaviour and its meanings in contemporary culture and throughout history. Introducing the major theoretical debates, the book examines different levels of violence - interpersonal, institutional and collective - and different forms of violence - such as racist crime, homophobic crime and genocide. It provides readers with a succinct and comprehensive overview of its nature and effects, and the solutions and conflict resolutions involved in responses to violence. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the text draws on evidence from sociology, criminology, primate studies and archaeology to shed light on arguments about the social construction and innate nature of violence. Engaging, wide-reaching and authorative, this is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in sociology, criminology, social pyschology and cultural studies.

Society, Violence, and Power 2 (1st and 2nd part), 2013

The second volume of the Society, Violence, and Power series divides the civilizations of the last two thousand years into three types. The first are those of "limited compassion", which seek to establish a universal compassion for which they implant abstract laws, but on the basis of a rigid and explicit hierarchy; These are the civilizations of China and India. The second are those of “subordinate egalitarianism”: Christianity and Islam, heirs to the leveling impulse of the Greek polis, Roman law and revealed religions; however, said legacy is kept at bay by the weight of the practices of the converted peoples, the enemies and the destructuring of the institutions of antiquity. To preserve earthly order in the midst of a wicked world, churches and Muslims renounce egalitarianism and impose a pecking order, at least in earthly matters. The third civilization is that of “rising expectations”, the Modern, which promises civil, political and socio-economic equality. However, like the previous two types of civilization, it fails in the most basic: in eradicating scapegoats, and, like Islam and Christianity, it is unsuccessful in its leveling mission. This book contributes to the analysis of the relationship between society, power and violence, begun in the predecessor volume. On this occasion, this study is achieved by following the traces of the three previously described civilizational models of contradiction around sacrifice, and a journey is made that culminates in the time and space in which we currently inhabit. In this way, the following pages lead us to question ourselves about our own role in the social origin of violence and its containment.

The Inauthenticity of Human Violence: A Critique of Modernity, 2021

The world spills violence. The violence of our socio-political and economic system, the violence of our media practices and logics, the violence of the reactionary demonstrations that have appeared around the world in recent years. From precarious ways of life that leave a large part of the population to survive -or to be exploited- to conservatism and extremism, through a general lack of empathy, as well as a lack of understanding of the ecological problem, all features of something that crosses different realities: violence. This text constitutes the Prologue of the book "The Inauthenticity of Human Violence: A Critique of Modernity" (Montana: EPIS Press), written by Kevin Boileau, PhD, and published on August 2021.

Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Vol. 2, ed. Werner Bonefeld, Beverley Best, Chris O’Kane, Sage, 2018, 607-624

Violence as a relation is the most obvious expression of the asymmetry of class antagonism. In capitalist societies the agents of violence are not merely of individual but also of structural and institutional nature. In the ongoing history of capitalist class struggle, the violence of the state is met by the counterviolence of workers or other excluded or oppressed groups. Since the modern state is founded on the dogma of the state monopoly on legitimate violence, there is a fundamental political asymmetry of state violence and non-state counterviolence (Benjamin). Whereas traditional Marxism theorized violence as the natural or naturalized status quo of class relations within class struggle, the later Marx of the ‘Critique of Political Economy’ and after him critical Marxism and critical theory complicated the picture by investigating the specific logic, temporality and modality of systemic violence. The latter comes only fully into view once the normal and normalized capitalist status quo is analyzed from the perspective of its repressed origin: Every mundane act of commodity exchange is a congealed remainder of the original violence of the so-called ‘primitive’ or, ‘ursprüngliche’ accumulation through which capitalism was historically implemented. The disruptive transformation from feudal to capitalist society was enforced through the violent separation of labor power from the means of production by way of expropriation, expulsion and brutal force (Marx). This uneven process, which in the case of Western Europe took from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, is still present in and, at the same time, repressed from the seemingly peaceful surface of the market. The same applies to the violence of colonialism and imperialism: it is an integral part of capitalism’s history and present (Fanon; Luxemburg).

Common Knowledge 22 (1): 81-104, 2016

To understand in any depth contemporary instances of human brutality, it is necessary to explore the long-term historical dynamics of the human relationship with violence. Given the paucity of evidence, much of the scholarship remains sharply divided over the question, How old is human violence? Despite disagreements, where some scholars regard humans as intrinsically violent and others emphasize their nonviolent characteristics, there is a pronounced tendency to rely, from both of these perspectives, on a simple naturalist epistemology. What is needed, at this stage of the controversy, is an alternative interpretation focusing on the structural foundations of violent action. If, instead of tracing violent (or nonviolent) behavior to "human nature," we assume that the origins of violence are linked to the rise and proliferation of complex social organizations, we may come to more far-reaching and significant conclusions.

European Journal of Social Theory. 16 (3): 273 - 291., 2013

Most analyses of violence in the different historical periods tend to view the modern era as significantly less violent than all of its historical predecessors. By focusing on such apparently reliable indicators as the decrease in homicide rates, the disappearance of public torture or growing civility in inter-personal relationships, many authors contend that our ancestors inhabited a substantially more violent world. In this article, I argue that since such blanket evaluations do not clearly distinguish between different levels of violence analysis, they are unable to provide an accurate picture of historical reality. To properly understand violence, it is necessary to compare and contrast its historical transformation at the interpersonal and intra-group (micro), the inter-group and intra-polity (mezzo), and inter-polity (macro) levels. When violence is comparatively analysed on these three interrelated levels, it becomes clear that the scale of collective brutality gradually and dramatically increases with the rise of modern social organizations and ideologies while the character of inter-personal and intra-group violence remains essentially constant.