Violence as Violation

The whole concept of "violence" is flawed from the get-go, for it makes no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate force. The use of the word in this generic sense implies that the "violence" of the criminal is no different from the "violence" of the policeman who subdues him. Originally a Marxist idea, this worked its way into the mainstream beginning about fifty or sixty years ago, when people began to think it very clever and sophisticated to act as if there were no difference between the two things, or that the difference was only a matter of how "society" had distributed power between them. Since then, the idea of "violence" as generic and not in its original sense — related to "violate" — of criminal and illegitimate violence has steadily gained ground until it is now a commonplace of moral debate, in America as it is everywhere else in the Western world.