Violence & Abuse

Violence is widespread to political life. The pre-political state of nature is often represented as a place of haphazard violence, which we break out by forming a political society under the rule of a centralized authority (the State) that maintains a monopoly on the lawful use of violence. When the legality of the State is challenged, and legal routes for voicing one's dissent are closed, citizens once again resort to violence. This can take diverse forms, from civil disobedience, to violence, to outright revolutions. Action that injures or obliterates that to which it is applied, Structural violent behavior or abuse is that which is intrinsic in circumstances whose intentional or unintentional consequence is injury and annihilation, and to which the authors of the circumstances are indifferent. In this sense coalmines, or family life, may obscure structural violence. The main social thinker to advise or glorify violence as a political means was Sorel.