The Legality and Justice of Violence

Abstract

Legality was fundamental to Weber’s concept of legitimacy. Predictable rules construct orders that people believe in. As discussed in the previous chapter, Weber did not pursue ultimate or transcendental criteria for assessing legitimacy, other than belief in the order underpinned by rules and evidenced as a social fact. So does legality ‘legitimize’ violence? Or what is the relationship between the two? And then we have the awkward question posed by Walter Benjamin: when does violence become law? This leads us not only to question the origins of law and the violence used in its ‘making’ and ‘preserving’, but also the relationship between the law, justice and violence. The great challenge facing a world of multiple injustices, is whether they can/should be resolved by violence in a world where violence in varied guises, including legally inflicted state violences, upholds unjust structures. In exploring violence as a phenomenon, both state violence in the name of legality and non state violence in the name of justice, are still meaning laden and generating acts and actions of somatic harm. The idea of just non legal violence has been compelling in history and continues to be so. This chapter argues that the idea of ‘legitimate’ and/or ‘just’ violence’ must be revisited, but from the lens of violence as a phenomenon rather than from the lens of an imaginary of ‘just violence’ to end all violence. By placing violence as a phenomenon at the centre, this chapter argues, we can explore the potential for its ‘designification’, through greater understanding of the triggers to aggression in our vulnerable biological bodies and its conversion into violence through our social relations/social body. Understanding aggression and reducing violences, opens up more social and political space for acting on injustices, including potentially, through the law if it can be ‘liberated from violence’ (Loick, Law without Violence. In C. Menke (Ed.), Law and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue (pp. 96–111). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018: 97). And in addressing injustices, we further our capacity to reduce violences in all expressions. Legitimacy in the order grows as conscious social action impacts on our sensibilities towards the vulnerable body and as (if) the order responds effectively and transforms accordingly. The temporality for this must be processual, rather than imagining a non-violent politics on the immediate horizon. Rather, violence is ‘designified’ and ‘desanctioned’ over time. As sensibility and understanding grows, violence no longer conveys and generates the meanings it once did so potently. Rather, we understand better and acknowledge the damage violence as a phenomenon does to individuals and to our human communities. And just as our sensibilities to racism, sexism, to slavery and exploitation have changed, albeit slowly and not universally, so they could change towards violence, through social and political action and agency on violence. Widening circles of shared meanings of what is ‘just ‘ are part of the democratizing impetus and outcome from recognition of our vulnerability to acts and actions of somatic harm. This is what the conclusion to this book will call an individual, social and, ultimately, historical momentum towards ‘Emotional Enlightenment’.