Abstract
America’s international and domestic paradigms of violence show how monopolies of violence can contradict one another by creating conditions that allow violence to flourish rather than stemming its reproduction. This chapter explores America’s international and domestic paradigms of violence within the context of Elias’s work on civilizing processes, the development of human aggression, monopolies of violence, and social integration and disintegration. This chapter builds upon Elias’s ideas of monopolies of violence and what constitutes civilizing and decivilizing trends within the larger scope of socio-historical developmental processes. The central argument of this chapter is that the historical trajectories of American violence abroad are irrevocably connected with the practice and conjugation of violence occurring within its own borders. The broad and sweeping task of uncovering the complexities of various historical modes and trajectories of American violence is outside the purview of this chapter, which rather concentrates on several key cultural components of American society that have assisted in its historical progressions of violence. These cultural components include America’s deeply held belief of “standing one’s ground”, free-market competition, hyper-masculinity, rugged individualism and an exceptional self-image. The first two sections of this chapter will discuss the international and domestic paradigms of American violence as they relate to the theoretical developments of Norbert Elias and the works of other Eliasian scholars. The final section will explore the paradoxical violence these two paradigms have created, where I draw out the decivilizing trends implicit in both. The significance of this work lies in its critical reflexivity of American violence, including how social, technical and psychological developments have shaped the strategic use of violence in American society, an intellectual endeavour that must adhere to the sociological developments of one of the most under-appreciated thinkers of the twentieth century.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ackerman, S. (2014). 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes—The facts on the ground. The Guardian. Retrieved July 8, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147
Alexander, Andrew. (2011). America and the Imperialism of Ignorance: How America Won the War and Lost the Peace - US Foreign Policy Since 1945. London: Biteback Publishing.
Baiocchi, D. (2013). Measuring army deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Retrieved July 8, 2015, from http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR145.html
Bridges, T., & Tober, T. (2015). Mass shootings in the U.S. are on the rise. What makes American men so dangerous?—Sociological images. Retrieved August 28, 2015, from http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/07/27/mass-shootings-in-the-u-s-what-makes-so-many-american-men-dangerous/
Brown, R. M. (1994). No duty to retreat: Violence and values in American history and society. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Bush, G. W. (2001). You are either with us or against us. CNN. Retrieved June 28, 2015, from http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/gen.attack.on.terror/
Bush, G. W. (2002). The national security strategy of the United States of America. Defense Technical Information Center.
Carrie, G. (2015). Afghanistan suicide bomb ‘kills 33’ near former CIA base. BBC News. Retrieved July 13, 2015, from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33502914
Cleves, R. (2011). Savage barbarities: Slavery, race, and the uncivilizing process in the United States. In C. Buschendorf, A. Franke, & J. Voelz (Eds.), Civilizing and decivilizing processes: Figurational approaches to American culture (pp. 103–122). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Currie, E. (1997). Market, crime and community: Toward a mid-range theory of post-industrial violence. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 147–172.
Department of State Archives. (2001). Interview on the news hours with Jim Lehrer. Retrieved July 16, 2015, from http://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/4914.htm
Dufour, Jules. 2014. “The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases.” Global Research. Retrieved July 8, 2015(http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases/5564).
Elias, N. (1981). Civilization and violence: On the state monopoly of physical violence and its infringement. Original manuscript of revised and edited translation from a lecture published originally in Joachim Matthes Lebenswelt und Soziale Problems (pp. 98–122), Frankfurt. Translated by John Keane 1987.
Elias, N. (1985–1986). Processes of integration and the balance of power. Original Manuscript. German Literature Archives, Marbach, DE.
Elias, N. (2000). The civilizing process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations (Rev. ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Elias, N. (2008). Power and civilisation. Journal of Power, 1(2), 135–142.
Elias, N., & Scotson, J. L. (1995). The established and the outsiders (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2015). Violent crime rates. Annual Uniform Crime Report.
Global Research. (2015). “These Are All the Countries Where the US Has a Military Presence.” Center for Research and Globalization. Retrieved February 3, 2017.
Kimmel, M. (2013). Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York: Nation Books.
Landler, Mark. (2016). “Obama Says He Will Keep More Troops in Afghanistan Than Planned.” The New York Times, July 6. Retrieved February 2, 2017.
Lartey, J. (2015, June 9). By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. The Guardian. Retrieved August 28, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries
Lorenzo, R. (2014). The Puritan culture of America’s military: U.S. army war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Loyal, S., & Quilley, S. (2004). The sociology of N. Elias. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, T. (2015). Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US Government. The Guardian. Retrieved July 13, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/04/police-killed-people-fbi-data-justifiable-homicides
Mennell, S. (1990). Decivilising processes: Theoretical significance and some lines of research. International Sociology, 5(2), 205–223.
Mennell, S. (2007). The American civilizing process. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Mennell, S. (2009). An exceptional civilizing process? Journal of Classical Sociology, 9(1), 97–115.
Mennell, S. (2015). Explaining American hypocrisy. Human Figurations, 4(2). Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0004.202
Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672.
Monten, J. (2005). The roots of the Bush doctrine: Power, nationalism, and democracy promotion in US strategy. International Security, 29(4), 112–156.
Obama, B. (2015). Obama on Charleston: Full transcript. The Guardian. Retrieved July 10, 2015 from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/18/obama-on-charleston-ive-had-to-make-statements-like-this-too-many-times
Olson, P. (2015). U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement. International Legal Materials, 54(2), 272–305.
Pratt, J. (2011). N. Elias, the civilizing process and penal development in modern society. The Sociological Review, 59, 220–240.
Stanford Geospatial Center. (2015). Stanford mass shootings of America. Retrieved July 10, 2015, from https://library.stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootings-america
Swaine, J., Laughland, O., & Lartey, J. (2015). The counted: People killed by police in the United States in 2015. The Guardian. Retrieved July 16, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database.
United Nations. (2015). World Drug Report 2015. Vienna, Austria. United Nations Publications.
Wacquant, L. (2011). Decivilizing and demonizing: The remaking of the Black American ghetto. In C. Buschendorf, A. Franke, & J. Voelz (Eds.), Civilizing and decivilizing processes: Figurational approaches to American culture (pp. 149–173). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Weber, M., Mills, C. W., & Gerth, H. H. (1965). Politics as a vocation. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Letteney, K.W. (2017). Self-Inflicted Wound: On the Paradoxical Dimensions of American Violence. In: Landini, T., Dépelteau, F. (eds) Norbert Elias and Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56118-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56118-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56117-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56118-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)