1 - Introduction: Interpreting the Violent State

Summary

If we were conjuring a fantastic nightmare, we would describe the state as a bloodthirsty beast that spends much of its time on the prowl, making war, imposing the death penalty, and spilling blood. We would see this beast busily covering its tracks, clothing its bloodletting in a rhetoric of necessity, the common good, or high moralism. Indeed, it is this combination of bloodthirstiness and rhetorical sleight of hand that would give the state its horrible power in our dreams.

In waking life, the state appears more benign, although it surely comes as no surprise to say that violence of all kinds is done every day with the explicit authorization of state institutions and officials or with their tacit acquiescence. Some of this violence is done directly by those officials, some by citizens acting under a dispensation granted by the state, and some by persons whose violent acts subsequently will be deemed acceptable. Because the bloodlust and bloodletting done, authorized, or condoned by state institutions occurs with all of the normal abnormality of bureaucratic abstraction, responsibility for the blood spilled is often untraceably dispersed. Because state violence seems so ordinary, so much a part of the taken-for-granted world in which we live, it is sometimes difficult to see the human agency involved. Indeed it is this distinctive combination of bloodletting and bureaucracy that makes the violence of the modern state possible in our daily lives.