Violence as a Problem of Health
Bibliography
Apfel R J, Simon B (eds.) 1996 Minefields in Their Hearts. Yale
University Press, New Haven, CT
Bell C C, Hildreth C J, Jenkins E J, Levi D, Carter C 1988 The
need for victimization screening in a poor, outpatient medical
population. Journal of the National Medical Association 80:
853–60
Bell C C, Jenkins E J 1993 Community violence and children on
Chicago’s southside. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological
Processes 56: 46–54
Cooley-Quille M C, Lorion R P 1999 Adolescents’ exposure to
community violence: Sleep and psychophysiological function-
ing. Journal of Community Psychology 27: 367–76
Fox N A, Leavitt L A 1995 The Violence Exposure Scale for
Children (VEX). University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Gottlieb G 1992 Indi
idual De
elopment and E
olutions: The
Genesis of No
el Beha
ior. Oxford University Press, New
York
Hill H M, Madhere S 1996 Exposure to community violence and
African American children: A multidimensional model of
risks and resources. Journal of Community Psychology 24:
26–43
Jenkins E J, Thompson B 1986 Children talk about violence:
Preliminary findings from a survey of black elementary school
children. Paper presented at the 19th Annual Convention of
the Association of Black Psychologists, Oakland, CA
Lorion R P 1998 Exposure to urban violence: Contamination of
the school environment. In: Eliott D S, Williams K, Hamburg
B (eds.) Violence in American Schools. Cambridge University
Press, New York, pp. 293–311
Lorion R P 1999 Community prevention and wellness. In:
Herson M, Ammerman T (eds.) Ad
anced Abnormal Child
Psychology. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 251–66
Lorion R P 2000 Theoretical and evaluation issues in the
promotion of wellness and the protection of ‘well enough.’ In:
Cichetti D, Rappaport J, Sandler I, Weissberg R (eds.) The
Promotion of Wellness in Children and Adolescents. Sage,
Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 1–28
Lorion R P 2001 Exposure to urban violence: Shifting from an
individual to an ecological perspective. In: Schneiderman N,
Tomes H, Gentry J, Speers M, Silva J (eds.) Integrating
Beha
ioral and Social Sciences With Public Health. American
Psychological Association, Washington, DC
Lorion R P, Brodsky A E, Cooley-Quille M 1998 Exposure to
pervasive community violence: Resisting the contaminating
effects of risky settings. In: Biegel D E, Blum A (eds.)
Inno
ations in Practice and Ser
ice Deli
ery Across the Life
Span. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 124–44
Lorion R P, Saltzman W 1993 Children’s exposure to com-
munity violence: Following a path from concern to research to
action. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 56:
55–65
Martinez P, Richters J E 1993 The NIMH Community Violence
Project: II. Children’s distress symptoms associated with
violence exposure. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological
Processes 56: 22–35
Osofsky J D, Wewers S, Hann D M, Fick A C 1993 Chronic
community violence: What is happening to our children?
Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 56: 36–45
Raviv A, Erel O, Fox N A, Leavitt L A, Raviv A, Dar I,
Shahinfar A, Greenbaum C W 2001 Individual measurement
of exposure to everyday violence among elementary school
children across various settings. Journal of Community Psy-
chology 29
16196
Richters J E, Martinez P 1990 Checklist of Child Distress
Symptoms: Self-Report Version. National Institute of Mental
Health, Rockville, MD
Richters J E, Martinez P 1993 The NIMH Community Violence
Project: I. Children as victims of and witnesses to violence.
Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 56: 7–21
Richters J E, Martinez P, Valla J P 1990 Le
onn: A Cartoon-
based Structured Inter
iew for Assessing Young Children’s
Distress Symptoms. National Institute of Mental Health,
Washington, DC
Richters J E, Saltzman W 1990 Survey of exposure to community
violence—Parent report version. Unpublished measure. Child
and Adolescent Disorders Research, National Institute of
Mental Health
Rubinetti F 1996 Empathy, self-esteem, hopelessness. and belief
in the legitimacy of aggression in adolescents exposed to
pervasive community violence. Unpublished doctoral dis-
sertation. University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Saltzman W 1992 The effect of children’s exposure to violence.
Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Maryland, College
Park, MD
Saltzman W 1995 Exposure to community violence and the
prediction of violent antisocial behavior in a multi-ethnic
sample of adolescents. Unpublished doctoral dissertation.
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Scarpa A, Fikretoglu D, Luscher K 2000 Community violence
exposure in a young adult sample: II. Psychophysiology and
aggressive behavior. Journal of Community Psychology 28:
417–26
Shahinfar A, Fox N A, Leavitt L A 2000 Preschool children’s
exposure to violence: relation of behavior problems to parent
and child reports. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 70:
115–25
Singer M I, Anglin T M, Song L, Lunghofer L 1994 The Mental
Health Consequences of Adolescents’ Exposure to Violence.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH
Singer M I, Anglin T M, Song L, Lunghofer L 1995 Adolescents’
exposure to violence and associated symptoms of psycho-
logical trauma. Journal of the American Medical Association
273: 477–82
Song L, Singer M, Anglin T M 1998 Violence exposure and
emotional trauma as a contributor to adolescents’ violent
behavior. Archi
es of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 152: 531–6
R. P. Lorion
Violence, History of
Violence in its various forms has been an aspect of
historical descriptions since Thucydides, but to this
day there is no independent specialty in historical
research on violence. The history of violence is thus
written as part of military and war history, of research
on revolution and protest, and of the history of gender
and the body. In Europe and elsewhere, it cuts across
the institutional and disciplinary logic of the study of
history. This lack of independence has two conse-
quences for historical research on violence. First, it is
always interdisciplinary and includes approaches

proper to political science and social history, as well as
issues of cultural history. Second, it cannot look back
on a unified development, but on disparate traditions
in the individual disciplines. While revolutionary
violence, for example, is discussed primarily in the
context of the French Revolution, research on social
protest has developed under the influence of 1950s
Anglo-American social history and of the reactions to
the 1960s urban riots in the USA. The historiography
of research on violence is thus many-stranded and
international.
1. Definitions of Violence
The definitions of violence are as varied as its
manifestations. The term itself takes on disparate
coloring in the context of each respective national
language. English, French, and Italian reflect the Latin
and emphasize the injuries caused by violence and its
violation of corporal integrity. By comparison, the
German term ‘Gewalt’ is less negatively charged, also
being used as a synonym for ‘power’ or ‘pou
oir’. Only
its extension ‘GewalttaW tigkeit’ captures the injurious
character of the Anglo-American term. A comparative
examination of the history of terms is a desideratum
for research.
The spectrum of scholarly definitions of violence is
broad. The distinctions between direct and indirect,
collective and individual, legitimate and illegitimate,
concrete and structural, physical and psychological,
and manifest and symbolic violence reflect varying
accents in the discussion. Depending on the definition,
the focus can be on the manifestations, the justifica-
tions, or the effects of violence. The term has been
specified further in accordance with its intended use
for qualitative or quantitative studies. Modern re-
search on protest sees collective violence when at least
20 persons take part in acts in which persons or objects
are damaged.
In the current discussion among historians, violence
is widely understood as injury to people’s physical
integrity, caused by various historical actors in various
contexts. Here, violence is not seen as an anthro-
pological constant, nor as a universal historical trait
held in common, but tied to the actions of specific
groups and conditions that are subject to change in
various national societies and epochs. The German
sociologist, Heinrich Popitz, has advanced this view
(Popitz 1986). He sees violence as ‘an act of power that
leads to the intentional bodily injury of others’. In this
view, corporality distinguishes violence from other
means of domination, such as orders, though it
contributes to their effect.
Since violence injures bodily integrity, it possesses a
massive potential for threat and evokes fears. These
can contribute to the avoidance of acts of violence, but
can also amplify them. The pair of terms ‘physical’ and
‘psychological’ violence touch on this connection. Not
Violence, History of
only does the experience of physical violence, such as
torture or rape, have psychological consequences;
psychological violence, such as brainwashing, can also
have physical effects. Popitz’ definition also points to
the concept of power. It thus designates the content
of violent conflicts as an often unequal structural
situation of victims and perpetrators. This underscores
that the history of violence is also always a part
of societal processes in which the distribution and
resources of power are up for discussion.
Beyond its physical core, the term violence has
taken on various meanings in the course of the modern
age.
(a) In the process of forming states, legitimate
violence is distinguished from illegitimate private
violence, independent of whether the latter is wielded
in revolutions or in defense of the status quo. The state
has defended and extended its monopoly on violence
as a constituting component of being a state since early
modern times. This monopoly prevailed through the
disarmament of the feudal rulers. With the army and
(since the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth,
centuries) the police, state organs exercised the mon-
opoly on legitimate violence. This monopoly required
justification in its form and degree, but not in its
existence. Lindenberger and Lu$ dtke saw the hallmark
of modernity in the network of relationships between
physically suffered violence, on the one hand, and the
state monopoly on violence, on the other (Lindenber-
ger and Lu$ dtke 1995). Thus they not only claim an
increase in the state’s practice of control and re-
pression, but also touch upon the everyday experience
of violence. In the modern age, citizens can come into
conflict with state regulations and sanctions, which in
turn provoke violent actions. In modern protest
research, Charles Tilly, among others, has held state
reactions to unrest responsible for the extent of
counterviolence (Tilly 1975).
(b) The experiences of dependency and inequality
between the centers of power, colonies, and the so-
called ‘Third World’ led the Norwegian social scientist,
Johan Galtung, to develop the concept of ‘structural
violence’ (Galtung 1975). From the perspective of
peace politics, he drew attention to a discrepancy. He
saw a chasm between the existing potential for
development based on technology and available soc-
ietal wealth, on the one hand, and the respective
levels of development of disadvantaged groups and
countries, on the other. His concept emphasizes, not
individual perpetrators, but social structures, and not
primarily physically-experienced violence, but poverty
and exploitation. He was not so much concerned with
legitimating counterviolence, as vehemently defended
by the Algerian sociologist, Frantz Fanon, but with
social peace, which he thought would be secured for all
through equality and opportunities for development
(Fanon 1961).
The term ‘structural violence’ flourished in the
1970s, but also met criticism. It was accused not only
16197
Violence, History of
of failing to define ‘structure,’ but also for lacking
specificity in its analysis of violence. ‘By tendentiously
deciphering all relations as relations of violence, these
relations are leveled,’ wrote Wolf-Dieter Narr (1973);
i.e., the analyses of violence and of society are
indistinguishable. Galtung was able to demonstrate
that the term ‘violence’ can be applied meaningfully in
the analysis of acts in the context of the forcible
relations effective in acts of exchange, in inculcating
literacy, and in migrations.
(c) The concept of symbolic violence is beset with
similar problems of distinction. Pierre Bourdieu and
Claude Passeron used it in their theoretical analysis of
the French school system and thus designated ‘that
form of violence’ that ‘is exercised against a social
actor with the complicity of this ‘‘actor’’’ (Bourdieu
and Passeron 1970). The experience is violent in that
the actors are subjected to a code of language and
behavior alien to them; it is symbolic through the
verbal and semiotic form of its mechanisms. These
shape the school’s demands and enable or prevent
scholastic careers. According to Bourdieu, by accep-
ting this code, the actors contribute to the lasting
legitimation of the scholastic system of selection. This
term rightly touches on the linguistic and semiotic
dimension of violence, but expands it to the point that
it no longer has clear contours.
(d) In the course of the development of gender
history in the 1990s, the concept of violence has been
extended to private forms of violence within the
family. Feminist literature has used the term ‘sexual
violence’. This refers to actions that appear in a form
tying societies to sexuality. They are carried out
against the will of persons who do not have the same
power resources as the perpetrators. Sexual violence is
thus analyzed as part of the inequality effective in the
relationship between the sexes. It shifts from an
exceptional phenomenon to one in terms of which the
paradigmatically prevailing ideas of power relations
and sexuality, and the experiences of women and girls
can be grasped. This extension of the concept of
violence not only opens new fields to scientific re-
search, but, since the 1980s, has also been taken up in
the penal codes of individual societies.
2. Historical Research on Violence
In the past, experience with violence was subsumed
again and again in theoretical sketches. Among
them, the theories of Thomas Hobbes, Max Webber,
and Hannah Arendt were doubtless the most influen-
tial, though they arose under disparate conditions
(Hobbes 1914, Weber 1919, Arendt 1970). But,
especially since the 1950s, their influence on historical
research on violence has been superseded by that of
Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and most recently
Clifford Geertz (Elias 1976, Foucault 1975, Geertz
1973).
16198
Thomas Hobbes was the primary inspirer of his-
torical research on violence (Hobbes 1914). In
seventeenth-century English society, which was no
longer integrated by religion, he demonstrated in terms
of contract theory the necessity of the state’s use of
violence. Hobbes postulated that, to pacify an English
society composed of private persons hostile to each
other, these persons relinquished their rights to the
Leviathan state, i.e., in the English case, to the absolute
monarch. In return, they received protection from
hostile others and the guarantee of societal peace.
The double function of the state’s monopoly on
violence—on the one hand, to protect the interests of
individuals, and on the other, to limit their possibilities
of self-realization and their rights—has become the
common possession of most analyses of violence since
Hobbes. The individual’s relationship to state violence
thus often develops from his specific experiences either
with the state’s protection or with its limitation of his
freedom.
Norbert Elias has provided important stimuli for
historical research on violence (Elias 1976). Elias
described European history since the Middle Ages as a
history of civilization. This hypothesis is based on two
central assumptions. First, Elias says that, in the
course of the expansion of the trades, commerce,
transportation, and the activity of the state, the
interaction among members of society became more
frequent and more dense. To the degree that they
competed for influence and shares of power, agree-
ments on behavior, and behavioral norms were re-
quired. In this process, civilized manners prevailed.
On the other hand, the state monopoly exercised an
increased external compulsion over the behavior of the
members of a society. This found its most complete
form in courtly society. In the realm regulated by
courtly etiquette, the individual’s success depended on
new civilized modes of behavior. To the degree that
peoples’ definition of themselves conformed to this
framework, forms of self-compulsion and control of
feelings resulted. Violent structures of interpersonal
societal relations receded as the model of civilized and
inner-directed acting spread from the upper strata to
the rest of society. Elias’ historical periodization has
been criticized by Hans-Peter Duerr, but his secular-
based hypothesis has nonetheless been very fruitful for
research (Duerr 1988–96).
Michel Foucault emphasized the shift in form and
content in state practices of punishment, which shaped
both societal reality and the individual’s life practice
lastingly (Foucault 1975). In his view, the practices of
domination targeting the body have shifted since 1800
to strategies targeting the mind. The disciplinary
measures carried out on the human body in clinics,
psychiatric facilities, and prisons took on a more total
character in the modern age. As in Jeremy Bentham’s
‘Panoptikum,’ the individual is now subjected to
control by institutions and the effects of techniques of
power, which in turn are provided by the fields of

study that dominate discourses (Bentham 1787). In
Foucault’s model, the direct violence of the exercise of
power made way for the violence of discourses—at
least after the threshold between the epochs, which he
locates around 1800. Historical studies have relativ-
ized this hypothesis and made it more specific, as
they did with Elias’ theories, but it too has retained its
importance as a challenge to detailed studies.
While Elias and Foucault locate the changing use of
bodily violence in epochal contexts and societal
macrosituations, cultural anthropological studies
have gained importance over the years, and they are
no longer devoted to the causes, but to the forms of
violence. Attention to the ‘how’ of the practice of
violence, a maximum of ‘dense description’ of constel-
lations of violence, and even an ‘ethics of precision’
(von Trotha 1997) is demanded for the description and
explanation of acts of violence and their results. In
referring to Clifford Geertz, recourse is taken to
anthropological approaches or variants of symbolic
interactionism are tested (Geertz 1973).
3. Emphases and New Fields in Historical
Research on Violence
3.1 An International Comparison of Violence
Historical research on violence has so far privileged
the national context and has seldom conducted in-
ternational comparisons. This concentration on the
nation state suggested itself, since the state monopoly
on violence stood in the center of research on violence.
But there are still some comparative works, based
partly on national research or inspired by the latter’s
questions. Among these is the long-term comparison
of the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, in which P. Spierenberg describes behavior
toward victims, the weak, and animals to demonstrate
a general increase of empathy in Europe (Spierenburg
1991). Charles Tilly formulated a typology of col-
lective violence in Europe, in which he names the
parochial conflicts—the feuds between geographical
communities (Tilly 1975). He uses the term ‘reactive
violence’ to designate resistance against state inter-
ference in the citizens’ way of life. According to Tilly,
proactive violence is exercised within those organiza-
tions that acquire, and seek to defend, their political
power.
All these investigations face the problem of having
to work with unequal and incomplete national data.
Since forms of protest and criminality take different
cultural shapes in different societies, views of reality
are often grasped as reality itself. In comparative
research on revolution, violence has often not been
accorded central importance. The only exception is
Arno Mayer’s study that contrasts the violence of the
French and the Russian Revolutions (Mayer 2000).
Finally, research on totalitarianism has pinpointed
Violence, History of
state terror as a central instrument of totalitarian
systems. Dietrich Beyrau has presented a critical,
detailed analysis contrasting and comparing violent
state measures (Beyrau 2000). It elaborates the similar-
ities as well as the differences between the violence of
the National Socialist and that of the Stalinist systems
of rule. Comparative studies permit discussion of the
charged question of modern research on violence:
whether private and public violence dwindles in or is
compatible with the functioning of modern society.
3.2 Collecti
e Violence as Social Protest
Research on protest is one of the most flourishing
branches of research on violence. The extent and
significance of acts of violence are examined in it. It
has taken on new contours since the 1950s, under the
influence of English, often Marxist-inspired social
history and of the 1960s American research on urban
riots. Insight into the inherent logic of popular action
has supplanted the condemnation of rage-blinded,
aggressive mob and crowd activity. Their violent
nature has been interpreted less as a defining charac-
teristic than as an aspect of social protests and less as
irrational than as a rational strategy. Georges Rude!
and Edward P. Thompson in particular have carried
out this revision (Rude! 1964, Thompson 1971).
Thompson has also drawn attention to the ‘moral
economy’. With this term, he designates the model of
violence as a fitting behavior by peasants, artisans, and
workers in response to the markets in times of
economic crisis or famine. Acts of popular violence in
Great Britain during the transition from the eighteenth
to the nineteenth centuries are set in relation to this
model and contrasted as a traditional alternative to
the developing market society. Thompson’s con-
tinuing hypotheses that these protests were directed
against the gentry have meanwhile been revised.
Nevertheless, building on Thompson, attention has
shifted to the significance of violent protests in a
strategy based primarily on negotiating and com-
promising with the authorities. In this context, John
Bohstedt speaks of a ‘protocol of riot’ that the
protesters strictly adhered to, in order to initiate
negotiations, rather than destructive activities
(Bohstedt 1988). When violence was nonetheless em-
ployed, its form was often borrowed from traditional
rituals or it was applied symbolically against objects.
Between 1770 and 1850 in Great Britain, France, and
Germany, the majority of protests against famine, tax
revolts, and resistance against conscription were
usually conducted nonviolently. Following the Amer-
ican urban unrest, Graham and Gurr later questioned
this hypothesis of violence’s positive significance for
negotiating processes (Graham and Gurr 1969). They
underscored that violence is, as a rule, unproductive,
while in Charles Tilly’s interpretation of violent means
as part of power struggles, they can indeed be
successfully employed (Tilly 1975).
16199
Violence, History of
Since the mid-1980s, this still influential view of
protest has been accused of attributing too much
rationality to it and of denuding it of its emotionality.
Alain Corbin in particular has pointed out the degree
to which fears, hopes, and rumors have been re-
sponsible for acts of violence (Corbin 1990). George
Lefebvre already traced plundering and acts of viol-
ence against the landed nobility in France in 1789 to
the effects of alarming news and fears in the rural
population (Lefebvre 1970). For his part, Corbin
describes how, on a market day in August 1870, a
crowd of 300–800 people tormented a young noble
and then burned him alive. He had been accused of
being a Prussian and of calling out ‘Vive la Re! pub-
lique.’ These acts, like the Grande Peur in the French
Revolution, can be traced to the spread of rumors, but
that does not explain their cruelty. For historical
research on protest, this finding suggests that violent
activity should be understood as part of a history of
the emotions.
The investigation of the history of violence has not
been limited to the extent and significance of acts of
violence, but has also asked about its instigators and
causes. The mass psychologist Gustav Le Bon has
attributed mass violence primarily to women (Le Bon
1908). Historical research on protest has shown that
women have taken part in acts of violence. But women
remained in the minority and were more intensely
active when the well-being of the family was at stake
than, for example, in conflicts with the military.
Beyond that, the social profile of people arrested for
manifestations of violence has been worked out. They
usually do not come from the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’
but are rural and urban wage-earners, sometimes from
tradesmen milieus. The people, more than the mob,
carried out these actions. Bohstedt, in particular, has
pointed to disturbed societal relations as one of the
causes of violence in Britain, especially where social
contact and dependencies between the upper classes
and the masses were attenuated (Bohstedt 1988). But
this hypothesis cannot be confirmed for other protests.
Whether acts of violence always followed social
disintegration, and whether rituals of violence do not
in turn presuppose relatively unified communities is a
question for additional research. In the past, historical
research on protest has concerned itself most with the
phase in which civic society was formed, but now it is
also examining the period between the world wars of
the twentieth century and is including the problem of
political violence to a greater degree. Its approaches
and methods must now prove themselves in this field.
3.3 Historical Research on Violence as Crime
Violent crime in its long-term historical development,
societal distribution, and meaning has been investiga-
ted primarily in terms of Europe in the Middle Ages
and early Modern Age, and in terms of the twentieth-
16200
century USA. Modern historical studies of crime
that also address nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Europe are rare. Quantitative international com-
parative studies of violent crime often exhibit
methodological deficiencies, because the data base in
the individual countries and through time is uneven,
and above all because the prevalence of recorded acts
of violence determined also depends on the strength
and severity of prosecuting authorities. Additionally,
Eastern and Central Europe have been almost com-
pletely omitted from almost all long-term studies, due
to the lack of research there or to language barriers.
Nevertheless, trend analyses from a bird’s-eye per-
spective can provide hypotheses that can then be
worked out in detail or modified by historical micro-
research. Spierenberg hypothesized a drop in the rate
of homicide in Europe before 1850 (Spierenberg 1991);
in contrast, studies of Western Europe and the USA
from 1800 to the beginning of the twentieth century by
Gurr and Lane find a rising rate of crime and homicide
(Gurr et al. 1977, Lane 1997). These rates allegedly fell
in the century from 1840 to 1940, only to rise again in
the middle or end of the 1950s, but individual studies
of crime in discrete nation states or cities do not
confirm this chronology. American research has con-
firmed the hypothesis that the USA was, and remains,
the most violent nation among the Western demo-
cracies. But it is still debated whether this can be traced
primarily to ‘frontier violence’ (Hollon 1974) and its
consequences.
Modern research on crime focuses on the relation-
ship between delinquents, the penal system, and
prosecution. Social history concerns itself with the
social origin and situation of criminals; legal history
and sociology investigate penal ‘labeling,’ which
criminalizes specific behaviors; and institutional and
political history is devoted to the construction of pros-
ecuting bodies. Nicole Castan and Gerd Schwerhoff,
among others, have conducted historical studies of
cities or regions, examining premodern societies’
approach to violent delinquency (Castan 1980,
Schwerhoff 1991). The following general finding re-
sulted. Until the early modern age, even homicide was
an infraction that was not punished automatically by
death, but it could be atoned for and expiated through
rituals and payments of money. In sixteenth-century
Germany, laws called for more severe punishments,
but court practice was orientated more toward re-
quiring expiatory measures benefiting the surviving
relatives than toward retaliation. This assessment of
violence was not surprising in a time that still accepted
it as a definite part of societal practices and rituals in
the premodern period. Among youth, villagers, and
journeymen and masters in trades, not only were
conflicts resolved by violence; initiation rites were also
organized around violence.
The criminalization and limitation of violence is a
process that began in the early modern age, but did not
fully prevail until the full-blown modern age. For

France, and based on the discourse of elites, Muchem-
bled reports on rapid advance of the process of
civilization, locating the criminalization of homicide
in the eighteenth century (Muchembled 1988). But
even for the eighteenth century, doubts have been
raised whether the draconian penalties prescribed can
be regarded as an indicator that more severe norms
prevailed, or if these penalties were intended to
compensate for the weakness of prosecuting authori-
ties. For it has been pointed out that, precisely in
premodern times, legal jurisdiction and police control
had not thoroughly penetrated into rural communities
in a number of European societies. For the nineteenth
century, Peter Gay has advocated the hypothesis that,
despite the criminalization of violence, it was indeed
tolerated in specific societal areas, to the degree that it
remained limited to and ritualized in them (Gay 1993).
He adduces the examples of the duel and students’
fencing to gain scars, corporal punishment in schools
and the army, and violence within marriage. The
question of when which practices were prosecuted
judicially and considered illegitimate violence has not
yet been investigated adequately in international
comparison.
3.4 Recent Approaches of Historical Research on
Violence
Historical research on violence has taken on new
dimensions in the newer style of the history of war and
the military. The latter is concerned with military
perpetrators of violence that exceeds normal military
action: participation in mass executions, acts of
annihilation, torture, or rape. Browning and Bartov
have been exemplary in pursuing this approach in
studying National Socialist police troops and the
Wehrmacht on the Eastern front respectively (Brown-
ing 1992, Bartov 1985). Concentrating on military
perpetrators opens up the analysis of wars that
accompany decolonization, the Vietnam War, and
warlike conflicts accompanying the collapse of the
bipolar world order. Beyond the discovery of formerly
unknown or repressed atrocities committed by soldiers
and officers, attention has focused on analyzing the
causes of such inhumane behavior. Current discussion
addresses the question of whether specific images of
community and\or group cohesion motivate the per-
petrators.
Beyond soldiers’ and officers’ motivation, inter-
action, and acts, research is also concerned with how
they deal with experiences with violence. To the degree
that interest in the history of memory and experience
increased, the effects of violence on postwar societies
has also been researched. World War I has been more
thoroughly considered than World War II. Even
today, it is becoming clear that societal discourse on
wars and on the legitimacy of the violence exercised in
them has as large a role as direct experience of violence
in dealing with the past. It turns out that there is a need
Violence, History of
to correct the one-dimensional assumptions that ex-
periences on the front are transformed directly into a
brutalization of postwar behavior.
Since violence is defined as physical injury, its
analysis is also part of the history of the body. The
experience of pain is not historically constant and
unchanging, but is influenced by respectively specific
bodily experiences and views of the body. The con-
ditioning of the human body by the military, prisons,
and insane asylums, whose importance has been
underscored above all by Foucault, as well as the
feelings felt and expressed thereby, are relevant as
parts of the history of violence (Foucault 1975). Just as
the awareness of the body, its integrity, and its injuries
are interpreted culturally, the views and assessments of
violent intrusions into the body—such as bodily
injury, homicide, rape, or torture—depend on the
respective common cultural patterns. In the future,
these must be examined not only in terms of their
shaping in specific epochs and by gender, but also in
terms of their disparate shaping in different cultures.
All this already indicates the degree to which
research on violence has profited in the late twentieth
century from interest in questions of cultural history.
In this context, simple attributions have become
problematical. The taboo against violence is no longer
seen as the dominant characteristic of the modern age,
whose ambivalence Baumann has underscored
(Baumann 1991). The media’s conveying and staging,
which depicts and overemphasizes acts of violence,
have contributed to this ambivalence of the modern
age. These connections are often mentioned in current
diagnoses, but there is a lack of comparative historical
research devoted to the respective cultures of violence
in various milieus and at various times. For most
epochs, not even the discursive boundaries between
violence and nonviolence are well enough known.
Special attention should be paid to the degree to which
state authorities and the upper strata of societies have
intervened in the justification of forms of violence and
in its condemnation. For the respective concepts of
violence all have a mediating link between the state
monopoly on violence and everyday experience.
See also: Arendt, Hannah (1906–75); Elias, Norbert
(1897–1990); Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Hobbes,
Thomas (1588–1679); Rape and Sexual Coercion;
Social Movements, History of: General; Social
Movements, Sociology of; Terrorism; Torture and
its Consequences, Psychology of; Totalitarianism;
Violence in Anthropology; Violence: Public; War,
Sociology of; Warfare in History; Weber, Max
(1864–1920)
Bibliography
Arendt H 1970 On Violence. Harcourt Brace, New York
Bartov O 1985 The Eastern Front, 1941–45. German Troops and
the Barbarisation of Warfare. Macmillan, London
16201
Violence, History of
Baumann Z 1991 Modernity and Ambi
alence. Cornell Uni-
versity Press, Ithaca, NY
Bentham J 1787\1962 Panopticon or the Inspection-House. In:
Bowring J (ed.) The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Russell &
Russell Inc., New York, pp. 37–172
Beyrau D 2000 Schlachtfeld der Diktaturen Osteuropa im
Schatten
on Hitler und Stalin. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
Go$ ttingen, Germany
Bohstedt J 1983 Riots and Community Politics in England and
Wales, 1790–1810. Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA
Bohstedt J 1988 Gender, household and community politics:
Women in English riots 1790–1810. Past and Present 120:
88–122
Bourdieu P, Passeron J P 1970 La Reproduction. En lements Pour
Une Théorie Du Système D’enseignement. Éditions de Minuit,
Paris
Brockhaus U, Kolshorn M 1993 Sexuelle Gewalt gegen MaW dchen
und Jungen, Mythen, Fakten, Theorien. Campus, Frankfurt,
Germany
Brown R M 1993 Western violence. Structure, values, myth. The
Western Historical Quarterly 24: 5–20
Browning C 1992 Ordinary Men. Reser
e Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland. Harper Collins, New York
Castan N 1980 Justice et reT pression en Languedoc a l’eT poque des
lumieZ res. Flammarion, Paris
Corbin A 1990 Le
illage des cannibales. Flammarion, Paris
Duerr H-P 1988–96 Der Mythos
om Zi
ilisationsprozeß, 4 Vols.
Aubier, Frankfurt, Germany
Elias N 1976 Uq ber den Prozeß der Zi
ilisation, Soziogenetische
und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 Vols. Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt, Germany
Emsley C, Knafla L A (eds.) 1996 Crime History and Histories of
Crime. Studies in the Historiography of Crime and Criminal
Justice in Modern History. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT
Fanon F 1961 Les DamneT s de la Terre. Maspero, Paris
Foucault M 1975 Sur
eiller et punir. Naissance de la Prison.
Paris
Gailus M 1990 Straße und Brot. Sozialer Protest in den deutschen
Staaten unter besonderer BeruW cksichtigung Preußens, 1847–
1849. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Go$ ttingen, Germany
Galtung J 1975 Strukturelle Gewalt. BeitraW ge zur Friedens- und
Konfliktforschung. Rowohlt, Reinbek, Germany
Gay P 1993 The Culti
ation of Hatred. New York
Geertz C 1973 The Interpretation of Culture. Basic Books, New
York
Graham H D, Gurr T R (eds.) 1969 The History of Violence in
America. Praeger, New York
Gurr T R et al. 1977 The Politics of Crime and Conflict. Sage,
Beverly Hills, CA
Hobbes T 1914 Le
iathan. J. M. Dent & Sons, London
Hollon W E 1974 Frontier Violence. Another Look. Oxford
University Press, New York
Julia D 1995 La violence des foules; peut-on e! lucider l’inhumain?
In: Boutier P, Julia D (eds.) PasseT s recomposeT s. Champs et
chantiers de l’histoire. Éditions Autrement, Paris, pp. 208–23
Kocka J, Jesson R 1990 Die abnehmende Gewaltsamkeit sozialer
Proteste vom 18. zum 20. Jahrhundert. In: Albrecht P A,
Backes O (eds.) Verdeckte Gewalt. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt,
Germany, pp. 33–57
Lane R 1997 Murder in America; A History. Ohio State
University Press, Columbus, OH
le Bon G 1908 Psychologie des Foules, 13th edn. Alcan, Paris
16202
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Lefebvre G 1970 La Grande peur de 1789. Colin, Paris
Lindenberger T, Lu$ dtke A 1995 Physische Gewalt—eine Kon-
tinuita$ t der Moderne. In: Lindenberger T, Lu$ dtke A (eds.)
Physische Gewalt. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany
Mayer A J 2000 The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and
Russian Re
olution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Muchembled R 1988 L’in
ention de l’homme moderne. Culture et
sensibiliteT s en France du X
e au XVIIIe sieZ cle. Fayard, Paris
Narr W-D 1973 Gewalt und Legitimita$ t. Le
iathan 1: 7–41
Popitz H 1986 PhaW nomene der Macht. AutoritaW t—Herrschaft—
Gewalt—Technik. Mohr, Tu$ bingen, Germany
Rude! G 1964 The Crowd in History, France and England. Wiley,
New York
Schumann D, 1997 Gewalt als Grenzu$ berschreitung. U= berle-
gungen zur Sozialgeschichte der Gewalt im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Archi
fuW r Sozialgeschichte 37: 366–87
Schwerhoff G 1991 KoW ln im Kreuz
erhoW r. KriminalitaW t, Herr-
schaft und Gesellschaft in einer fruW hneuzeitlichen Stadt.
Bouvier, Bonn, Germany
Spierenburg P 1991 The Broken Spell. Macmillan, London
Thompson E P 1971 The moral economy of the English crowd in
the eighteenth century. Past and Present 50: 76–136
Tilly C 1975 The Rebellious Century. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA
von Trotha T 1997 Zur Soziologie der Gewalt. In: von Trotha T
(ed.) Soziologie der Gewalt (KZfSS, 37). Ko$ lner Zeitschrift fu$ r
Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Opladen\Wiesbaden,
Germany, pp. 9–56
Weber M 1919 Politik als Beruf. Duncker & Humblot, Munich,
Germany
H.-G. Haupt
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Violence in Anthropology
Across the Cold War and the collapse of great-power
socialism, anthropological studies of violence have
focused on international patterns of revolution,
counterinsurgency warfare, state terrorism, militant
ethnic nationalism, communal violence, and organized
crime (Wolf 1969, Das et al. 2000). The field has also
reconsidered the violence of Western colonialism, the
epistemic violence of states that marginalize devalued
groups, and the structural violence inherent in systems
of inequality that consign great numbers of people to
unstable incomes and life-threatening poverty, hunger,
and preventable disease (Schepper-Hughes 1992,
Bourgois 1995).
This array of issues contrasts with social anthro-
pology’s earlier functionalist focus on the internal
regulation of social tensions, leadership transitions,
and intergroup hostilities in lineage-based societies,
imagined as isolates. The turn to examining the
interplay of local communities and state politics, and
the political consequences of globalization has revital-
ized the subfield of political anthropology.
Although the discipline has appropriated issues
from political science and comparative sociology
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7