Invitation to Professor Siniša Malešević's Inaugural Lecture
The UCD School of Sociology is pleased to invite you to the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Siniša Malešević:
Faces of Brutality: Towards a Historical Sociology of Violence
Tuesday 22nd November 2011 at 17:00 Theatre NT1 (Lower Ground Floor) Newman Building
University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4
Followed by a reception in the Staff Common Room (B104) Newman Building
Abstract:
Most comparisons of violence in the different historical periods tend to view the modern era as significantly less violent than all of its historical predecessors. By focusing on such apparently reliable indictors as the general and continuous decrease in homicide rates, the disappearance of public torture or growing civility in inter-personal relationships many authors contend that our ancestors inhabited a substantially more violent world. In this paper I argue that since such blanket evaluations do not clearly distinguish between different levels of violence analysis they are unable to provide an accurate picture of historical reality. When infliction and legitimisation of violence is comparatively analysed on the three interrelated levels (macro, mezzo and micro) it becomes clearer that the scale of collective brutality gradually and dramatically increases with the rise of modern social organisations and ideologies while the character of inter-personal and intra-group violence remains essentially constant. Hence it is the modern era that surpasses all previous historical epochs in the quantity of mass slaughter as in modernity both inter-group and inter-polity violence radically expand. Moreover these processes of mass extermination take place at the very same time when the sanctity of human life becomes a universal norm. In other words, there is an intrinsic discrepancy between a normative universe that prizes human life and disdains brutality while simultaneously practicing killing at an exceptional rate. The paper attempts to explain this paradox by focusing on the cumulative increase of organisational and ideological powers in modernity.