미국의 살인율에 관한 논쟁

Abstract

This essay reviews two recent debates about why the homicide rate has long been relatively high in the United States. The debates took place among American historians calling attention to the federal system of government, ineffective social control by communities, and other features peculiar to the United States and their European counterparts trying to elaborate the civilizing process, which in the 1930s Norbert Elias conceptualized in order to explain the long-term decline of violence in modern Europe. The debaters often referred to the larger context, but they failed to explore the relationship between violence and state and that between private violence and public authority; they took for granted the modern state with a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. It is noteworthy, then, that the American state relied upon private power as much as upon public authority, which was evident under slavery and the system of racial segregation.