As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Yonathan Listik looks Norbert Elias’s “Civilization and Violence: On the State Monopoly of Physical Violence and its Infringements,” from Telos 54 (Winter 1982).
Norbert Elias’s argument in “Civilization and Violence: On the State Monopoly of Physical Violence and its Infringements” is especially helpful for understanding the developments of terrorism, and it also applies to contemporary phenomena such as the war on drugs. He contends that placing the monopoly of violence in the hands of the state comes from a desire of harmonization. The assumption is that stability depends on an imposed self-discipline. That is, the state represents the interests of the collective and should provide for it. This is very enlightening considering the assumptions in the “war on drugs.”
