Violence: A Modern Obsession by Richard Bessel (review)

Bessel’s Violence: A Modern Obsession is a comprehensive work about Western attitudes toward violence during the twentieth century. His book can be considered a meta-study of the humanities and the sciences in its description of how, for the last thirty years, scientific enquiry has become increasingly interested in studying violent behavior. Indeed, ever more books on this topic populate the shelf space of scientific libraries, alongside new journals and research institutes devoted to the subject. This awareness is also observable in politics and the media. Yet, all of this activity is taking place at a time when those theorizing about violence “live lives remarkably free of the phenomenon about which they write” (18). Violence, Bessel argues, has become an “obsession” in the West, and attitudes toward it have changed significantly during the course of the last 150 years.

In his exploration of perceptions and attitudes, Bessel takes care not to assert that violence has been declining throughout the course of history, as Steven Pinker recently argued in his influential (yet often criticized) The Better Angels of Our Nature (London, 2011).¹ While maintaining distance from the crux of Pinker’s argument, Bessel sometimes comes close to admitting that violence has indeed become less common in the West. However, far from writing a teleological history of the decline of violence in the civilized world, he repeatedly underscores that this decline must be regarded as a highly fragile and likely reversible process.

According to Bessel, the replacement of violence with a greater appreciation for empathy in social relations is reflected by researchers’ change in focus from the perpetrators to the victims of violence. This shift is a result of seven broad changes: (1) the violent experiences of the first half of the twentieth century, (2) growing economic prosperity, (3) legitimate and secure political structures, (4) enhanced life expectancy and appreciation of life, (5) the greater participation of women in the public realm, (6) the diminished importance of military institutions and values, and (7) the media’s increasingly critical discourse and agenda. Bessel examines these developments, which led to a peculiarly Western model of society and thinking that Münkler dubbed the “post-heroic society,” in dedicated chapters of the book that discuss violence from various perspectives—for example, entertainment, religion, politics, war, and the private sphere.² In these sections, Bessel describes the role that violence has played in each case, pointing out how, what, when, and why it altered.

Such a wide-ranging topic necessitates a broad approach. Bessel brings the findings of various disciplines, such as gender studies, law, psychology, and the social sciences, into his thesis. This tactic proves particularly helpful when it includes empirical data or imports information to issues about which historical sources remain largely silent, such as marital rape or child beating. Nonetheless, Bessel stays within the established framework of modern historiography, not venturing too far beyond it, notwithstanding the interdisciplinary work mentioned above. Given his background and training as a historian, traditional narrative unsurprisingly constitutes the core of his methodology, providing the template that weaves together the various threads throughout the book. However, evolutionary theory and biology—on which Pinker relies heavily—are virtually absent in his analysis, as are cognitive and social psychology, disciplines that have contributed substantially to research about the causes and effects of violent behavior.³ Moreover, the debate about the media’s influence of violent behavior is longer and more complex than Bessel suggests.⁴

Admittedly, however, the inclusion of scientific findings in historical research is hardly commonplace; the utilization of such data usually presents a challenge to historians hailing from an altogether different intellectual tradition. Although Bessel has not written a truly interdisciplinary book, his systematic approach contains many starting points for further research. It offers a masterful and sophisticated overview of the complex shifts in the understanding of violence in the Western world.