Violence and Democracy

Extract

Violence and Democracy. By John Keane. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 226p. $65.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.

This is a very readable discursive essay. In consequence, John Keane's many digressions are provocative and informative, for example, his meditation on death on page 40 or his short history of the British peace movement on pages 83–88. His method also adds greatly to the reader's pleasure: He identifies key authors in a wide range of related fields, summarizes their key works, links them together, one generous summary after another, and finally, criticizes the synthesis he has just created. For example, after summarizing and synthesizing Hans Mangus Enzensberger's, Martin van Creveld's, and Robert D. Kaplan's views on post–Cold War “uncivil wars,” Keane remarks: “The temptation to think of contemporary uncivil wars as ‘primitive’ is itself primitive. It should be resisted” (p. 115). He then resists the temptation by discussing primitive warfare among Muslim desert tribes and Native Americans, as described by Ernest Gellner and Pierre Clastres, respectively. The value of this method is that one learns in a critical manner what others think. The disadvantage is that the issues in hand are never addressed.