The civilizing state embodies the very violence it claims to purge.

Evidence

The logic of modern civilizing processes is reflected, among other things, in the increasing commitment to broadly shared values: the unacceptability of murder, the rejection of violent assault at least as social norms, and so on. As Locke argues in his Treatise on Government, the reticence of individuals in the state of nature to have to spend the better parts of their existence fending for themselves and fending off dangers from others is motivation sufficient to prompt them rationally to abrogate most all responsibility – and so too ability (ought implies can) – for social protection to the state. This entails, in other words, that the monopoly over the means of violence, the very defining condition of statehood Weber would later recognize, be concentrated in state apparatuses. In so doing, as Zygmunt Bauman shows, European modernity simultaneously becomes the process of insulating possession of the means and exercise of violence against moral consideration, determination, condemnation. … So there is a constitutive connection between modernization as increasing civility and the potential of the state to be licensed to commit violence, in the extreme even in a genocidal fashion. As the civilizing state assumes the monopoly of the (legitimate) means of violence, the state becomes in some sense (and in a variety of ways and to varying degrees) the embodiment of violence. Counter-intuitively, “civility” and “barbarity” (“Holocaust phenomena,” “uncivil abnormality,” “terrorism”) are caught up together in mutually making and reinforcing ways, the one serving no doubt to delimit the other. In both directions, as the growing popularity of war crimes tribunals, crimes against humanity, etc. in one direction and the quick disposition to violating civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism in the other both attest. You’re either on our side or for terrorism, friend or enemy, forcing out any possibility of critical nuance between those crushing extremes. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 238

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bauman’s work on modernity and the Holocaust already in my knowledge base; also relevant to Horkheimer/Adorno’s dialectic of Enlightenment in my Frankfurt School reading. — connects to: Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 250; Civilizing modernization enables the state’s licensed violence — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 238; Violence with impunity is practiced in the name of civility (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Civility veils rather than ends sanctioned state violence #corroborates (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 250
• Violence with impunity is practiced in the name of civility #corroborates (0.90)
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it #corroborates (0.88) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285
• Civilizing modernization enables the state’s licensed violence #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 238