33 - Violence, Civil Society and European Civilisation

Summary

The control and sublimation of violence is a story that is essential to the idea of modernity and the rise of the West. The ability to control one’s emotions is fundamental to the notion of aristocracy and its right to rule over others. Sixteenth-century Europe saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. It is axiomatic to notions of the civilising process that the new civility progressively tamed and controlled violence during the early modern period. But this is not what happened. There was a significant increase in homicide rates from the mid sixteenth century which peaked in the mid seventeenth century. There was a notable increase in elite violence in particular, as gentlemen transgressed codes of etiquette in order to provoke rivals and demonstrate their social superiority. The invention of civil society at the end of the seventeenth century was a response to the problem of violence. The knowledge that European society had undergone a pacification process over the previous half a century was crucial to the invention of ‘civilisation’, a word first coined in the 1750s. This word and its cognates were crucial to legitimising the European colonial project. The language of civilisation was employed as a euphemism for violence, justifying ethnic cleansing and enslavement, and enabling the perpetrators of violence to distance themselves from their victims.