Violence and Democracy

The text below, with a few minor changes, was delivered as an address to the 1970 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in New York City.

If this were five or seven years ago, some intellectual profit might be derived by speaking about “Some Positive Functions of Violence.” But that lode has already been mined to utter exhaustion, so that not even strip-mining will yield enough ore to justify any serious investment.

Moreover, it is apparent that violence per se, like conflict, or peace, or war per se, cannot be judged as valuable or worthless. Further specifications are, obviously, always required—ends sought, values in balance, moral systems to be preserved. Even then, we are so lacking in the arithmetic required for moral or social balance that judgments of the net outcome are likely to be persuasive only to those who share common systems of weighting and preference. How much, for example, does the value of a smashed computer weigh against the value of 180 students momentarily “radicalized” by the sight of police dragging off the peer-group computer-smashers? And that is a relatively simple case; at least sufficiently simple so that ...