Introduction: Violence, Redemption, and the Liberal Imagination

Candace Vogler and Patchen Markell

Violence haunts liberal political thought. The defining image of early modern European social contract theory—and an image that remains potent in contemporary contractarian moral and political theory—locates the possibility of civil society in a compact among men who are long accustomed to the use of force in the bloody business of self-assertion and self-preservation. These men, so the story goes, surrender their right to fight one another (and to dominate the defenseless), investing a common, sovereign power with the right to command obedience for the sake of peace, justice, prosperity, and reasonable expectations of security. In turn, their consent legitimates this common power—the state—at least as long as its use of coercion serves the welfare and good future of a voluntarily toothless citizenry.1

This is an image of redemption from violence. Casting the state as the bringer of peace and prosperity into a disorderly world, this picture replays, in secular terms, the Christian theme of an epochal transformation in the human condition that the Oxford English Dictionary unsurprisingly lists as the first definition of redemption: “deliverance from sin and its consequences by the atonement of Jesus Christ.”2 At the same time, however, this is also an image in which violence persists, though often reorganized, renamed, or repressed. While the liberal state aims to control our violent tendencies by depriving us of the right to use force against one another, it also takes into itself the right to use violence in pursuit of this goal, exemplifying the capacity of redemptive aspirations not only to suppress but also to motivate and direct the coercive use of force. And often to disguise it: when one arm of society is elevated to a position of dominance over, and putative difference from, all others, its uses of force can easily come to be euphemized—as “patient justice,” for example, something altogether different from the pathological “violence” it combats.3 Similarly, since the liberal state thus conceived derives its legitimacy from the lingering threat of interpersonal violence, its redemptive promise must coexist, uneasily, with a portrait of the liberal individual as a very dangerous person. Without the benefit of a coercive sovereign power holding everyone in check, the liberal individual will use any means necessary in the pursuit of material benefits, will struggle to the death for the sake of recognition, honor, or self-esteem, and can have no good reason to expect decent treatment from his fellows.

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Notes

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chaps. 13–18; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pt. 2, secs. 4–21, 77–131. For an exemplary trace of this story in contemporary contractarianism, see John Rawls’s account of the “circumstances of justice,” which include scarcity, conflicts of interest, and vulnerability to attack. For Rawls, the circumstances of justice help guide deliberation in his hypothetical “original position”—that is, the position from which the social contract is negotiated, in which citizens are supposed to be deprived of any knowledge of their concrete socioeconomic circumstances; see Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), sec. 22. For a neo-Hobbist account that makes the Hobbist state of nature central to a liberal moral and political theory, see David P. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially 158–65. Gauthier marries a reading of Hobbes to work in game theory and rational choice theory to produce a model of both the Hobbesian problem and an alternative solution.
2. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “redemption.”
3. “Fellow citizens, we’ll meet violence with patient justice—assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come.” George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” 20 September 2001. Available on-line at www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2001/09/20010920–8.html.