This volume offers reflections on the relationship between violence and democracy by an important contemporary philosopher. The author argues that violence is not inherent in the human condition. In fact, civil society and democracy relegate violence to the realm of the “contingent”, meaning it occurs (who could deny), but there is no causal requirement for its occurrence. Civil society and democracy provide various well-known mechanisms by which violence is rendered unnecessary or superfluous. On the other hand, the author goes on, by their very openness and pluralism civil societies create opportunities for the expression of violence by among others criminal psychopaths and by those who fail to get what they want and feel humiliated as a result. The author concludes by stipulating ten rules, e.g. “… resist the drift towards ‘law and order’ strategies…” (p. 175), that would mitigate the threat of politically motivated violence. Overall, the argument is compelling but the evidence mustered in support of it is almost exclusively anecdotal.
Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 183 pp., USD 26.99, ISBN: 0-521-60310-2 (pbk). Reviewed by Manus I. Midlarsky (Rutgers University) This book is a striking meditation on democracy, or more precisely the violence that is presumed to lie at its heart. Violent acts are claimed to be necessary for the founding of a democracy, because without them a people cannot will itself into existence and be sovereign. Daniel Ross emphasizes two democracies, Australia and the United States, the former to critique the exclusion of “illegal aliens” from the Australian mainland, and the latter in the use of Guantanamo as an internment site for “enemy combatants”. Here, Ross draws limited parallels between Auschwitz and Guantanamo citing the extra-legal nature of both facilities, and the ability of the respective political leaders to dictate the terms of their usage. The author sees a robust conservative tradition lying at the root of Guantanamo’s current status; even the American decision to invade Iraq is attributed to this source. Winston Churchill, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Paul Wolfowitz understood the virtue of democracy not so much as an intrinsic good, but as a much-preferred alternative to the exterminatory intentions of virulently anti-democratic leaders like Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein. The last three thinkers named above had been heavily influenced by the memory of the Holocaust. Thus, the invasion of Iraq became justified by the past or present misdeeds of vicious genocidal dictators who deserved to be removed by violence, if necessary. Inevitably, in a discursive analysis without systematic empirics there are problems. For one, the United States was not established as a sovereign entity de novo, but in the