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Abstract
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Meaningless violence is rare. If we leave aside pathological violence (acknowledging that 'pathological' itself is a social construct), the resort to violence is usually objective-driven in some sense.Footnote1 Speaking broadly, one objective might be to try to make the world the way that - from the perpetrator's perspective - it ought to be, i.e. to replace one state of affairs with another. The perpetrator in this case wants to order the world to fit his or her objectives, even if that reordering is as simple as 'you have something I want and I am going to take it'. Another objective might be simply to upset the status quo, that is, to disrupt or destroy an existing state of affairs. Even here, however, perpetrators - unless they are driven by pure nihilism, which is very rare indeed - are out to create conditions that will lead ultimately to a different order. In short, violence and order are bound together. One might even argue that violence, regardless of our intuitions about its essentially destructive or disruptive nature, is fundamentally ordering behaviour.
Yet it is precisely here that the problems with understanding violence start, because 'violence' and 'order' can each mean different things depending on whom you ask.Footnote2 How people understand violence and order depends on their context, in particular on their position in the 'triangle of violence' (performer, victim, observer) described by the anthropologist David Riches.Footnote3 Moreover, how they articulate what they mean by these terms and contest what other people say - in other words, how they talk and argue about violence and order - likewise depends on who is talking about the behaviour of whom and in what context.
Our purpose in this special issue of Global Intellectual History is to explore different possible meanings of and relationships between violence and order, and different possible ways of talking about and debating these meanings and relationships. To do this, we use the medieval past of Europe as a laboratory. In the process, we hope to show that doing intellectual history is not just a matter of exploring written treatises, in which authors formally engage with ideas. Just as violence and order are not absolutes, neither is intellectual history; human beings express, debate, and act on ideas in many different ways.
What violence means is frequently treated as self-evident. To quote William Ian Miller, 'We all think we know it when we see it. Our conversations assume that it is bad, that it would be better if there were less … '.Footnote4 As such, it does not require definition; we simply assume that 'violence' involves hurting people and breaking things, an act of violation or coercion. This assumption is not just a feature of popular or casual discourse: it is frequently visible in major works of scholarship aimed both at broad audiences and narrow ones.Footnote5 Facing these, in contrast, are authors who try very hard to define violence. These authors offer up coherent, universal definitions that they can use as a heuristic to compare violence across cultures - that is, to evaluate and analyse violent behaviour in a variety of contexts present and past.Footnote6 In the process, they sometimes define violence in a way that conflicts with popular usage, and often conflicts with the definitions of other scholars.
Language: en |