Trust and Violence by Jan Philipp Reemtsma (review)

Long considered in Germany to be a thinker and public intellectual second only to Habermas, Jan Philipp Reemtsma is not well known outside his native land. Trust and Violence is his magnum opus, bringing together fifteen years of his work on violence, modernity, and good and evil in ways that should change the way we think about all of them. What is remarkable about this book is its ability to offer page after page of brilliant (and—even more remarkable, given the subject—often very funny) insights on topics that range from why Shakespeare’s analysis of power is better than those of Machiavelli and Lenin, to the difference between erotic love and rape, to the contrasting worldviews of the Aztecs and the Conquistadors, and still maintain the clear lines of argument and analysis that one hopes to find in major philosophical work. The author’s command of the empirical literature, particularly concerning violence—from the history of medieval torture to studies of Vietnam veterans—is complemented by profound readings of the classic philosophical literature. The combination of empirical observation and sharp-sighted philosophical investigation produces a rare and badly needed analysis.

Reemtsma starts from the insight that the most often asked question about the Holocaust makes no sense. He answers the question “How is it possible that ordinary men could commit such crimes?” with the laconic response: Who else should do it? There are not enough sadists to go around. Of course, murderers can be normal fathers when they come home; we do not expect painters to come home and paint their children, either. Twentieth-century discussions of violence either mystify or pathologize it, he argues, and do not see that the very question entails a norm that is a basis of modernity: violence is abnormal and ought to be contained by the state. He then offers a history of violence that is fascinating but without the sort of allure criticized (to my mind, not nearly enough) by Sontag and exemplified by Foucault—whose romance with violence Reemtsma deplores and demolishes. His description and typology of violence comprise a sufficiently original take on this very heavy history to absorb even readers who think they have had a surfeit of information about evil.

There are few enough writers who look into these abysses without flinching, and those who do tend to wind up in nihilism of one sort or another. (Foucault is at least an interesting example thereof; I have always been bewildered by contemporary attention to authors like Giorgio Agamben and John Gray, but I seem to be immune to the mysterious seduction of pessimism.) Reemtsma not only refuses to take that route, he lays out another. On his view, violence cannot be understood without understanding the concept of trust and the peculiar relation between the two. Not violence but trust, he argues, is the foundation of power, and gives among other examples the stunningly simple one that even a tyrant has to sleep, so that his power depends on trusting, and on having convinced other people to trust him by something other than violent means. This argument, along with the empirical description of the history of violence, supports Reemtsma’s insistence on the reality of progress, in the fullest possible sense.

By the close of this book we are left with a two-pronged argument against cynicism. The first prong depends on the philosophical insight that even instrumental reasoning is framed by norms that determine what ends and means are. By showing that the cultural criticism that laments the failures of modernity depends itself on modern norms, Reemtsma provides part of the basis for reestablishing trust in those norms. The other prong of the argument against cynicism is empirical and is based on the author’s vast knowledge of the history of violence. Nobody reading his examples can accuse this author of refusing to face facts or ignoring the horrors of modernity. Some readers may question the appropriateness of a German author mounting an argument that...