Het mandaat om te moorden

Samenvatting

The Mandate to Kill. A response to Abram de Swaan's (1999) argument that the modern state monopoly on the exertion of violence may coincide either with the spread of civility or with dyscivilization (ie, the division of social groups and territories into socially acceptable and unacceptable compartments, thus officially tolerating maltreatment of the latter). De Swaan's reassessment of the traditional hypothesis that the dismantling of a monopoly of violence is a necessary condition for the occurrence of mass murder is deemed especially interesting; in order to gain insight into the theoretical backgrounds of this reevaluation, existing sociological perspectives on related matters are summarized. Discussed are Emile Durkheim's description of rituals, Freud's thesis of the aggressive group libidinal surplus, the phenomenon of culturally mandated social problems as depicted by Everett Hughes (1962) and Michael Lewis (1978), and Randall Collins's (1975) analysis of violence in terms of (wild) ferociousness, (purposeful) callousness, and (internalized) ascetism. The potential usefulness of these views for the further development of dyscivilization theory is pointed out. S. Paul