Modern civilization idealizes itself while being constitutively built on incorporated violence

Evidence

John Keane suggests that the eighteenth-century assumption at work here, that violence is antithetical to civil(ized) society (because normatively reflective of (leftover) antique barbarisms), remains the silent assumption marking almost all theories of civil society. Violence, Keane insists, chronically persists within all extant civil societies. This is surely right, though he fails to comprehend what so many other commentators deny, not that violence persists, which is still to assume that civilization is the purging from society of violence, if only we could get it right. Rather, the more difficult recognition is that modern societies aren’t just marked by violence but constitutively founded upon and committed to incorporating and (not quite) covering over the various expressions of violence, civil and state(d). … To claim not just the mantle but the motivation of the civil, of civilization, for such violence is at least to claim its legitimation if not righteousness, its asserted and assertive justification if not justice. It is a legitimation which in modern social terms is always factored through the cast(e) of race, even as that cast is at once denied. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s threatened-privilege research insofar as it frames legitimacy claims as race-factored yet denied — a mechanism whereby dominant groups naturalize structural imposition. — connects to: Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284; Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 236; Civilization is the project of rendering violence invisible and virtual — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 234 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236
• Civilization is the project of rendering violence invisible and virtual #expands (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 234
• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 284
• Claims to civilization often mask violence and egoism #qualifies (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 251
• Modern civilization produces its own barbarians from within rather than from outside #expands (0.78) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 739
• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity #expands (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 694
• Civilizational pathologies emerge systemically rather than from individual intentions #complicates (0.75)
• Violence with impunity is practiced in the name of civility #qualifies (0.72)
• Violence both closes down existing ways of being and can open new possibilities #epitomizes (0.70)