LAW & NONVIOLENCE

The Problem

A critical dimension of modern life is the moral and political permissibility—or the aura of unavoidability— granted to violence. Whether practiced by states or by autonomous and globally dispersed non-state actors, modern modes of violence take complex forms and are justified (or condemned) in complex legal and philosophical language. Far from moving the law and its jargon away from our archaic barbarisms, modern political and technocratic culture has woven the law even more closely with the mutating shapes of our will to cruelty (and our will to punish, sometimes by neglect). 

Some expressions of this will take spectacular forms, such as the violence witnessed in times of terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and nighttime missile offensives launched by states and non-state actors over the high seas. Other forms are underpinned by identifiable ideological impulses and claims to reason and higher purpose, like those that are conducted in the name of revolutionary justice, racial purification, class warfare, or humanitarian intervention. But perhaps most frequently, violence in modern life functions through the rhetoric and structure of political rationality, good governance, human rights, social security, and moral duty. In the last century, constitutionalism has appeared as the juridical site of these extreme measures and cruelties, all couched in the language of humane governance and even popular will. 

What separates modern practices of violence from premodern forms, thus, is not only their immense visibility aided by science, mass mobilization, and mass media. What separates them is also the conceptual and jurisprudential rigor that sustains their rhetoric and practice. We shall call this the jurisprudence of neglect. Which is simply to say, moderns think more rigorously about both the necessity and futility of violence. Indeed, what we call modern politics—secular and religious, anti-democratic and authoritarian, imperial and anticolonial—has over the last three centuries generated more concepts, norms, laws, judgments, and understandings than any other period in recorded history of who we as humans are, and what we might, at the very limit of our humanity, become when violence (as choice or necessity)
presents itself to us. 

Violence may repel us. But it also unavoidably constitutes us, our very selfhood. Many of these concepts that anchor our moral universe, such as that of “self” and “individual” have complex histories, which in turn share complex relationships with one another and across political traditions. In this course, we are concerned with those particular concepts— will, freedom, law, and justice—that emerged within the context of nineteenth and twentieth century political culture and transformed our understanding of what it means to be free and to be human. In this Capstone Seminar on Law and Nonviolence, we examine the relationship of those conceptual transformations with the century’s political thought and its violent racial, moral, and planetary crises today. And we ask: what would it take to imagine a politics without violence?