Modern societies are constitutively founded on violence, not purged of it

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). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 236

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that civilization does not merely contain but is constitutionally built on incorporated violence is a paradigm-shifting reorientation shared with my Frankfurt School material, but this chapter adds the civil-society frame rather than the critique-of-instrumental-reason one.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 236
• XREF: connects to: Cultivation and repression both rest on inherited class violence.; Conceptions of liberty are themselves constituted through violence. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1828; Social progress has hidden, not ended, the modern discourses causing domination. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 671 (+3 more)