Virtuous Violence

This radical and thought-provoking book argues that violence does not result from a breakdown of morality, but is morally motivated.

If democracy liberates individuals from their inherited bonds, what can reunite them into a sovereign people? In The Virtues of Violence, Kevin Duong argues that one particular answer captivated modern French thinkers: popular violence as social regeneration. In this tradition of political theory, the people's violence was not a sign of anarchy or disorder. Instead, it manifested a redemptive power capable of binding and repairing a society on the cusp of social disintegration. This was not a fringe view of French democracy at the time, but central to its momentous development. Duong analyzes the recurring role of the people's redemptive violence across four historical moments: the French Revolution, the imperial conquest of Algeria, the Paris Commune, and the years leading up to World War I. Bringing together democratic theory and intellectual history, he reveals how political thinkers across the spectrum proclaimed that violence by the people could repair the social fabric, even as they experienced democratization as social disintegration. The path from an anarchic multitude to an organized democratic society required the virtuous expression of violence by the people--not its prohibition. Duong's book urges us to reject accounts that view redemptive violence as an antidemocratic pathology. It challenges the long-held view that popular violence is a sign of anarchy or disorder. As shocking and unsettling as redemptive violence could be, it appealed to thinkers across the spectrum, because it answered a fundamental dilemma of political modernity: how to replace the severed bonds of the old regime with a superior democratic social bond. The Virtues of Violence argues we do not properly understand modern democracy unless we can understand why popular redemptive violence could be invoked on its behalf.

Dismantling the image of the peaceful and serene colonial goodwife and countering the assumption that New England was inherently less violent than other regions of colonial America, Emily C. K. Romeo offers a revealing look at acts of violence by Anglo-American women in colonial Massachusetts, from the everyday to the extraordinary. Using Essex County as a case study, Romeo deftly utilizes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources to demonstrate that Puritan women, both "virtuous" and otherwise, learned to negotiate the shifting boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable violence in their daily lives and communities. The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts shows that more dramatic violence by women -- including infanticide, the scalping of captors during the Indian Wars, and even witchcraft accusations -- was not necessarily intended to challenge the structures of authority but often sprung from women's desire to protect property, safety, and standing for themselves and their families. The situations in which women chose to flout powerful social conventions and resort to overt violence expose the underlying, often unspoken, priorities and gendered expectations that shaped this society.

This illuminating, in-depth studypresents a wealth of case material, demonstrating the many manifestations of religious violence-not just war and terrorism, which are the focus of so many discussions of religiously motivated violence-but also more prevalent forms. The author, an anthropologist, devotes separate chapters to: - sacrifice (both animal and human); - self-mortification (including self-injury, asceticism, and martyrdom); - religious persecution (from anti-Semitic pogroms to witchhunts); - ethno-religious conflict (including such hotspots as Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, and the former Yugoslavia); - religious wars (from the ancient Hebrews'' wars and the Christian Crusades to Islamic jihad and Hindu righteous wars); - and religious homicide and abuse (spousal abuse, genital mutilation, and "dowry death," among other manifestations). In the final chapter, "Religion and Nonviolence," the author examines nonviolent and low-conflict societies and considers various methods of managing conflict. This book goes a long way toward helping us understand the nature of violence generally, its complicated connections with religion, and how society in the future might avoid being blindsided by the worst aspects of human nature.

In The Perversion of Virtue, suicide researcher Thomas Joiner explores the nature of murder-suicide and offers a unique new theory to explain this nearly unexplainable act: that 'true' murder-suicides always involve the wrongheaded invocation of one of four interpersonal virtues.

“A fascinating new analysis of human violence, filled with fresh ideas and gripping evidence from our primate cousins, historical forebears, and contemporary neighbors.” —Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature We Homo sapiens can be the nicest of species and also the nastiest. What occurred during human evolution to account for this paradox? What are the two kinds of aggression that primates are prone to, and why did each evolve separately? How does the intensity of violence among humans compare with the aggressive behavior of other primates? How did humans domesticate themselves? And how were the acquisition of language and the practice of capital punishment determining factors in the rise of culture and civilization? Authoritative, provocative, and engaging, The Goodness Paradox offers a startlingly original theory of how, in the last 250 million years, humankind became an increasingly peaceful species in daily interactions even as its capacity for coolly planned and devastating violence remains undiminished. In tracing the evolutionary histories of reactive and proactive aggression, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham forcefully and persuasively argues for the necessity of social tolerance and the control of savage divisiveness still haunting us today.

Virtuous War is the first book to map the emergence and judge the consequences of a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. James Der Derian takes the reader from a family history of war and genocide to new virtual battlespaces in the Mojave Desert, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and American universities. He tracks the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and do-good ideologies that produced a chimera of high-tech, low-risk ‘virtuous wars’. In this newly updated edition, he reveals how a misguided faith in virtuous war to right the wrongs of the world instead paved the way for a flawed response to 9/11 and a disastrous war in Iraq. Blinded by virtue, emboldened by technological superiority, seized by a mimetic terror, the US blundered from one foreign fiasco to the next. Taking the long view as well as getting up close to the war machine, Virtuous War provides a compelling alternative to the partisan politics, instant analysis and technical fixes that currently bedevil US national security policy.

Teacher-administrator Philip Dow explores the implications of setting intellectual character (rather than intellectual content) at the heart of our educational programs. With ample stories and practical suggestions, Dow shows how intellectual virtues like tenacity, carefulness and curiosity are teachable traits that can produce good lives.

‘I hope that this short thought provoking meditation on rightful responses to injustice will trigger a societal discussion for the conscience and future of liberal democracies.’ Marc Sageman, former CIA officer ‘I find Qureshi’s personal tone profound and loud, and it does what all good works of politics and anti-racism should. It makes visible the most intimate ways white power impacts us, destroy us, and has us dream about our futures.’ Yassir Morsi, author of Radical Skin, Moderate Masks ‘Drawing on an extraordinary range of influences that includes Primo Levi, Tupac Shakur, fourteenth century Islamic jurists and the Qu’ran, Qureshi weaves a moving account of his personal political journey through the horrors of the early 21st century into an inspirational call for racial and political justice and critical Islamic scholarship.’ Matthew Carr, author of Blood & Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain In this new work of political philosophy, Asim Qureshi reflects on injustice he sees in the world around him. Covering issues from torture and extrajudicial killings, to racism and discrimination, A Virtue of Disobedience takes the reader on a journey through the history of oppression, and begins a conversation about how previous acts of resistance and disobedience, through faith and virtue, can be liberating in the range of contemporary issues communities face today.

The most violent places in the world today are not at war. More people have died in Mexico in recent years than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. These parts of the world are instead buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, corruption, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places—from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia—have been able to recover. In this powerfully argued and urgent book, Rachel Kleinfeld examines why some democracies, including our own, are crippled by extreme violence and how they can regain security. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, mobsters, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies that successfully fought seemingly ingrained violence and offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that are able to protect the lives of their citizens. Taking on existing literature and popular theories about war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and a blueprint for what we can do to help.