Action that occurs in a group or social context has always held a certain fascination for students of human behavior, partly because of our many notions about the powerful forces that groups exert on the individual. Impressions of group forces derive in part from Le Bon's (1895) early account of crowd behavior, which characterized the crowd's power over the individual as control that was essentially hypnotic, resulting in extremities of behavior, from brutal cruelty to altruism. More recent analyses of group influences have been concerned with the means by which groups elicit and maintain individual conformity to goals, values, and standards shared by the group. For example, Kelman's (1961) theoretical analysis of the processes of social influence has been a significant contribution to our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of conformity phenomena.

The imposition of penalities for violation of criminal laws has been traditionally justified for such reasons as social justice and retribution. Today, perhaps the main justification for imposing severe penalties on those who violate the law is that such punishments serve as a specific deterrent to future violations by the offender and as a general deterrent to violations by others who might be tempted to follow his lead.

The impact of what judges decide is a crucial part of what is studied by those sharing a political rather than only a legal perspective on the United States Supreme Court. It has become important as we have shifted our attention from “output, which is the decision of the Court including its orders and statement of policy” to consideration of “outcome, which is the final results or impact of output” (Barth, 1968: 315, note). This development is much more recent than the beginnings of the political perspective on the courts. Explicit attention to impact, backed by studies of impacts of particular decisions, is less than twenty years old, dating from the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which made political scientists aware that compliance with decisions of the Supreme Court was neither automatic, immediate, nor uniform. As Krislov (1963: 7) has remarked, from the standpoint of Court process, the decision in Brown v. Board of Education has had its greatest effect in educating “students as to the limits and operations of the court system generally.”

Since group violence is but one of several means of conducting conflict, explanation for its occurrence must be embedded in a comprehensive theory of conflict. Yet violent conflict is so topical and important that an effort to reflect on it sociologically is well worth undertaking at this time even in the absence of a comprehensive theory of social conflict. Indeed, Max Weber (1947: 133) has written that “the treatment of conflict involving the use of physical violence as a separate type is justified by the special characteristics of the employment of this means and the corresponding peculiarities of the sociological consequences of its use.” In this essay, I shall avoid definitional and typological exercises, and concentrate rather on specific, testable hypotheses and empirical uniformities of group violence that have been put forward and commented upon at various times. I shall also present some data and findings bearing on the hypotheses that, while not “testing” them in rigorous fashion, will do more than simply provide plausible illustrations that can always be found whenever a large body of historical and contemporary cases is carefully searched. The final aim of the paper is to link up these hypotheses and uniformities in more systematic fashion than is presently available although the paper does not spell out a systematic theory of group violence. At this stage of theory when a plausible case can be made for a large number of hypotheses, it is important to spell out the specific conditions under which specific hypotheses are thought to be applicable.

The central theme of this paper concerns the difficult question of whether the use of force, and, generally, the coercive character of a political regime stimulates or inhibits the occurrence of political strife and violence. More specifically, two questions are raised: First, what is the relationship between the degree of regime coerciveness and the amount of violence experienced within political systems? Second, in what way does the consistency or inconsistency with which force is applied affect internal political stability and turmoil?

Political scientists until recently have ignored the study of the process involved in complying with Supreme Court decisions. As Richard M. Johnson (1967: 4) has stated, to neglect such studies “is to neglect an indispensable segment of the total judicial process.” Despite the increasing awareness of the importance of this aspect to the judicial process, there are still almost no studies which attempt a comparative analysis of patterns of compliance with or resistance to Supreme Court decisions.

Several philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have recently begun to reexamine the problem of explanation in social science. Instead of describing man in terms of organized traits, needs, drive-cathexes, coping and defense mechanisms, or self-actualizing tendencies, the new movement is concerned with “man as rule follower.” This paper outlines the essentials of such an approach (nomotics—from the Greek nomos, “law, convention”–refers to the study of human rule systems), beginning with an examination of four behavior systems which can be conceptualized as networks of rule-governed activities. We describe some key properties of rule systems, point out certain important differences in the manners in which they are used, and suggest methods for studying rule systems in general. We also present an analysis of the topic of obedience, a central factor in the operation and preservation of any given system.