Communication and the Monopolisation of Force

Whether one investigates primary sources, intellectual products or works of art from the early modern period, or whether one reads secondary materials about it, the most striking feature is the perception of violence by the early moderns as the predominant problem of the time. Although violence can be assumed historically to have been ubiquitous, it had not always been perceived as a problem. Under the conditions of the warrior society of the feudal period, violence had not been made and, in fact, could not have been made into the widely recognised problem it became in the early modern period. This is attributable to at least two factors. On the one hand, a worldview had still been in place here that precluded violence from being addressed as a problem; on the other, the social strata had still been so isolated that they were incapable of communicating and thus playing conflicting forms of thought and experience off against one another (Mannheim 1972, 5–11; Giesecke 1992, 74–76). Given the nature of feudalism, a discourse about the problem of violence was simply not a possibility. In addition to this, however, a starting point for the construction of violence as a problem did not exist under these conditions. This is the case, paradoxically, because of the fact that violence in a crude and undifferentiated form pervaded the whole complex of feudal relations. In the struggles of the feudal lords against one another, physical and non-physical forms of military and economic violence were not only present in the relationship of warrior to warrior, but also combined to shape both the social and psychological structure (Elias 1982, 150–51, 235–37, 261). With the warrior nobility locked in mutual struggles, feudal relations were continually under the threat of the sudden irruption of direct physical violence. Violence was personalised, part of everyday life and omnipresent.

It was only once communication had penetrated the whole of society, so that different interpretations could be publicly aired (Mannheim 1972; Habermas 1979; Hill 1992; Giesecke 1992, 77), and once the use of force had become circumscribed and controlled, that violence could be perceived as a problem and be made into an issue. Both of these conditions started to apply at the beginning of the modern period.