Reason and violence

Paul Dumouchel

Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict (Third Edition), Vol. 4. (2022) Academic Press, 369-376

Keywords: (12)
rationality, violence, social contract, subjective utility theory, social justice, just war theory, colonialism,
modern state, monopoly of legitimate violence, terrorism, dichotomy of reason and violence, cost-benefit
analysis.

Abstract: (100 words)

A long tradition views the relation between reason and violence in the form of a dichotomy where reason is
both opposed to violence and constitutes an alternative means of resolution of the conflicts. This dichotomy
is not a mere conceptual opposition, it is also a historical phenomenon. In order to be socially efficacious, the
opposition between reason and violence requires specific cultural and institutional conditions which
historically were provided by the modern state monopoly of legitimate violence, that should not be
understood merely as commanding superior force, but as a moral authority that distinguishes between good
and bad violence.

Definitions and dichotomy

The initial difficulty in addressing the question of the relations between reason and violence is that we are
dealing with two rather ill-defined terms. First, reason and rationality are not only notoriously hard to define,
but they also constitute 'moving targets' so to speak. Over time, and especially perhaps during the last 50
years, our conceptions of what is reason, of what constitutes rationality and of what is reasonable, have
profoundly changed, leading to disagreements and uncertainty. Different disciplines like economics, 1
philosophy,2 social justice theories,3 or psychology4 promoting various notions which are sometimes related,
sometimes vastly different. Some proposing that rationality can be reduced to purposeful action and that is
only one strategy among many, of which natural selection is the most prominent, that augment the
probability that an organism will reach its intended goal? 5 Others implicitly suggesting that we should
perhaps abandon the idea.6

There is as much, if not even more disagreement concerning violence and the various forms which it may
take. How should we define and distinguish between different types of violence, between individual,
subjective, objective, structural, symbolic, foundational, political, ethnic, psychological, historical,
internalized, genocidal or religious violence?7 Or should we simply think that in all these cases the first term
is simply an adjective that qualifies violence, which itself always is one and the same thing. However, if that
is the case nobody it seems is able to define what that reality is. Able to define violence independently of any
or all of these adjectives; able to determine what is similar between these different forms? Able to answer the
question: what makes them all violence? Every attempts at a unified definition seem inevitably exposed to
counter-examples from one or another of the various forms. Violence is not always physical (psychological
violence), it is not always intentional (objective violence), it does not necessarily have a perpetrator
(structural violence) and sometimes it apparently does not involve any harm at all (symbolic violence). What

1 The now classic idea in the discipline of rationality as maximizing expected utility.
2 Hampton (1998), Nozick (1993).
3 For example, Rawls (1993) idea of public reason or Sen's (2009) conception.
4 Gigerenzer & Selden (2001).
5 See for example: (de Sousa, 2007). For a recent overview of this complex situation, see (Dumouchel, 2018a).
6 Kahneman, at the very end of Thinking fast and slow presents rationality as an unattainable ideal, but he claims that
we should not conclude that people are irrational (2011:411-412). This is all that he has to say about rationality in a
book of more than 400 hundred pages dedicated to how we should think, suggesting that the issue has lost its
importance.
7 To this list we could add various associated terms like oppression, repression, discrimination, bullying, harassment,
etc. all of which are commonly considered as forms of violence. See Scheper & Bourgeois (2004) for insights into
the complexity and variety of phenomena of violence.

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is violence? What constitutes its characteristic trait that should allow us to distinguish violence from, and
recognize it in, other types of behaviors? No one appears to be able to provide a clear and simple answer.

Should we then abandon attempts to define the terms and pretend that the problem does not exist? Assuming
that everybody knows what we are talking about when we use the words 'violence' or 'reason'. Perhaps that
one way out of the difficulty of failing to provide agreed upon independent definitions of both reason and
violence lies in the very project that brought us to formulate it in the first place: inquiring into the relations
between reason and violence. Ill-defined as the two terms may be and changing through time as they have,
an essential aspect of their relation has remained: the opposition between reason and violence. A very old
tradition that goes at least from Plato all the way to us opposes reason to violence, both at the individual and
at the collective levels. This opposition is normative, and it is cognitive. Not only is it the case that the two
terms in this dichotomy do not have the same moral value, they also have very different epistemic values.
From the moral point of view, reason is good, it should cultivated and developed while violence should be
avoided and is always bad, even when it cannot be avoided. Furthermore, from an epistemic point of view,
violence is also blind. It tends to obscure agents' judgment and to trap them in no-win situations, while
reason is enlightening, a safe guide to wisdom and happiness.

As time went by the content of this opposition evolved. What is viewed as violence and what is considered
reason changed, but the dichotomy itself and the normative evaluation it provides have endured. It is true that
reason has sometimes been accused of being violent and that violence often claims to be rational. Yet, these
reversals failed either to invert or to dissolve the dichotomy. In fact, when for example, instrumental,
technological, or economic rationality are accused of being violent, they are also condemned as constituting
a debased or inferior form of rationality, a kind of perversion of reason. When violence is considered rational,
it tends for its part to be viewed as 'not quite violence', for example as a legitimate force or as a justified
reaction against oppression to obtain justice or freedom, which in the circumstances cannot be achieved by
any other means.8 Violence, in other words, is only morally acceptable if it is limited, held in check by
reason, in which case it is not quite violence anymore. The dichotomy thus persists, but not exactly in its
original form. When reason turns out to be violent it becomes less rational, or less than rational, and when
violent is considered rational it tends to be less violent or even other than violence. The two terms have
maintained their value, but they do not necessarily exclude each other, hybrid forms are now to be found.

The way in which this dichotomy rules, not only philosophical reflection, but also our practical and
institutional thought can be illustrated with the help of the principle of proportionality; a basic tenet of
international law and Just war theory, more precisely of jus in bello.9 According to Just war theory civilians
should never be targeted by any military operation, violence can exclusively be exerted against military
objectives. However, it may be the case that an attack against a military target will result in a number of
civilian casualties. Normally the attack in such cases should be abandoned. The principle of proportionality
says that this ‘indirect’ violence against non-combatants may sometimes be permissible if the military target
is sufficiently important and the collateral damage sufficiently limited. If there is, in other words, a right
proportion between the (bad) violence against civilians and the importance of the (good) military gain. Only
if the military advantage expected from the operation is very high can limited collateral civilian casualties be
lawful (Dewyn, 2020). Clearly, what legitimizes the violence in this case, what makes it acceptable is that it
is viewed as rational, as conform to a basic principle of rationality, the cost/benefit ratio.

I propose to consider that this dichotomy is primordial. That reason first appeared in its opposition to
violence and this opposition is (partially) defining of what reason is. However, the issue I contend is not
purely theoretical. The opposition of reason to violence is not just a question of ideas, but also of practice
and of institutions, as the above example concerning the principle of proportionality suggests. Reason is
opposed to violence de facto, and not just in theory. It is institutionalized as a practical means of controlling

8 See for example Honderich (2003)

9 In just war theory jus in bello is distinguished and opposed to jus ad bellum. The second addressed the question of
the justice of war, whether or not a war is just and which party in the conflict is right. Its main characteristic is that
it imposes a moral difference between the opponents, between those who are morally justified to fight and those
who are not. To the opposite jus in bello - justice in war - disregards the question of who is right and who is wrong
in the conflict to focus on what are permissible methods of fighting and what are not. It postulates a form of moral
equivalence between the opponents, preventing anyone of justifying a greater use of violence because his cause is
just.

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and restricting violence. Institutional conditions are a necessary part of this opposition and they determine
the form that it takes. When these conditions fail, the opposition becomes inoperative in practice and tends to
be challenged and abandoned in theory. It does not disappear entirely, but the place it occupies in our culture
and practices changes radically.

The opposition of reason to violence, as mentioned above, has been with us for a long time. We find clear
examples of it in various Greek and Roman authors, throughout the Middle Ages and in Renaissance
philosophy. Then, suddenly towards the end of the wars of religion its status was profoundly modified. In the
17th and 18th centuries reason came into its own, not only as a, but essentially as the guiding principle of
knowledge and morality. Leaving authors to wonder what place they should grant to other principles of
conduct like the sentiments, religion, or the virtues. We call it the Age of Enlightenment. This transformation
intellectually and institutionally shaped to a large extent the world in which we live. However, reason did
come alone, but with its dark shadow, with the institution of a new economy of violence. Codified especially
clearly in social contract theories, that are still central to our political thinking and that underlie the
legitimacy of democratic institutions, the opposition between reason and violence provides the foundation of
our social order.

Violence and contractualism

Social contract theories in spite of many differences between them share a similar basic conceptual structure
(Boucher & Kelly, 1995) which may be summarized in the following way. The social order, a just polity, or a
legitimate government stem from the consent of those who participate in it or are subjected to it. This
founding agreement is rational and universal, in the sense that everyone concerned equally takes part in the
contract.10 This contract, unlike the Covenant of the Old Testament, is not introduced from the outside by a
transcendent power that secures its legitimacy, but finds in itself its own authority, which it transmits to the
power to which it gives rise. The reason why people agree to renounce to their original freedom and to
submit to the constraint of a common power is to gain protection against the violence that is inherent in a
condition where each one must assure his own defense and where vengeance can never be final. In this
contract, it is their own violence, in the form of their right to avenge themselves, that individuals give up and
transmit to the state (Dumouchel, 2015). They want to escape each other's violence and reason, each one's
individual reason, leads them to an agreement. Reason indicates the way out of reciprocal violence: to
transfer all their violence to the state. This transfer allows them to later participate in the many advantages of
a peaceful and well policed society. At the heart of the conceptual structure of social contract theories is the
opposition of reason to violence and the transfer of multiple sources of violence to a unique authority. In this
opposition and transfer our social order finds its ultimate foundation.

More recent versions of the social contract, for example Rawls (1971) which remains highly influential, tend
to neglect, or at least not to mention the issue of violence, though they do not entirely leave it out of the
account. They reformulate it in a way that tends to hide its centrality and to minimize the danger it
constitutes. Yet, violence, at least potential violence, remains present as the question of the stability of the
social order. According to Rawls, the well-ordered society that results from a rational agreement among
reasonable persons reduces occasions of conflict and is stable (1971:545-455). In both what he defines as
ideal and as non-ideal theory, violence does not appear under the guise of the absence of social order, as it
did among early social contract theorists, nor even as a direct challenge to that order, but as possible
disruptions engendered by unfair, that is by less than rational or unreasonable social arrangements. This
reformulation may be considered to reflect a difference in historical perspective. From a time where, as in
Hobbes (1651) ending a civil war of religion and providing a non-religious basis for the political order was
an urgent problem to one where that order is now secure and its justice, or lack of, is viewed as the main
cause of social disruptions. Rawls was well aware of this change of perspective. In "Justice as Fairness:
Political not Metaphysical" (1985), he argues that his conception of justice as fairness is rooted in the idea of
democracy and of the social contract as historical solutions to the violence of the wars of religion. However,
that historical experience, according to him, constituted a lesson from which we had learned. So that the
conceptual structure of the problem remained the same, but its concrete form was now different.

10 This raises two issues. One is what is the meaning of "concerned"? Who exactly is or is not concerned? At some
point in time, it will be understood to refer to all property owners, at another to all adult males, and now to every
adult both women and men. Furthermore the group of those concerned may be limited by specific territorial or
ethnic requirements. The second issue is that even if the contract is universal and concerns everyone, the decision
may be majoritarian rather than unanimous.

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Social contract theories expound the founding myth of modern democratic societies: that a purely rational
compact is at the source of human associations and that the social order is legitimate because it has been
freely endorsed, and is periodically freely re-endorsed, by every individual. To say that it is a myth is not to
claim that it is perfectly false or that it has no relation to reality, but that this rational fiction misrepresents the
truth. It hides the violence from which our social order emerged and through which it is maintained.
Furthermore, it inverts the relationship between reason and violence that is instituted by this order. It is a
founding myth because it provides the justification of our modern democratic social order, -- that people
consent to the laws by which they are governed -- and puts that justification of the order beyond the reach of
any possible revision. It is also a founding myth because it institutes the distinction between good and bad
violence.11 The sovereign power that emerges from the social contract does not only declare what constitutes
the legitimate use of force and what is violence, but it also performs that distinction as an act of its sovereign
power.

Before turning to this founding myth of modern democracy, it is useful to pause and to consider its
remarkable success. According to John Dunn (2019), the word democracy pretty much disappeared from
political theory and discourse for more than 2000 years.12 During that time, the rare occasions when the word
was used were to refer to a bad disorderly form of government, a regime that was to be rejected and a
dangerous idea. Towards the end of the 18th century suddenly democracy, in a profoundly changed form
made its dramatic return in the American and French revolutions. Within a little more than two hundred years
it had conquered the world to the point that we seem unable to envisage any other political ideal.13 Today just
about every country feels obliged to present itself as a democracy. Whether it is ruled by a truly elected
independent parliament, or is an autocratic authoritarian regime, or governed through a one-party system, all
adopt the language and some of the trappings of democracy. Even military coups commonly present
themselves as a temporary expedient whose goal is to bring back (or to protect) democracy. Democracy has
become the unsurpassable horizon of our political thought.

Of course, it will be argued that many of these regimes are not really democracies, but that is precisely the
point. Why is it that the free rational consent by people to the rules by which they are governed appears as
the necessary and sufficient condition for a political regime to be legitimate? Why is there apparently no
other possible source of legitimacy for a modern political power? So that even governments whose political
practice is far from democratic nonetheless claim to represent the will of the people. Why is it that within our
political thinking democracy is now the only form of government that can be legitimate? This universal
success cannot be dismissed by saying that these false democratic pretenses are mere lip service, and that
very many countries, perhaps most, are not democratic. For the point is not whether or not they are
democratic, but why they need to present themselves as such. Why is it that some of these regimes, popular
democracies or some authoritarian, nationalist, and populist governments view themselves as embodying a
superior form of democracy? We may disagree with these claims; the question is why are they made?14 To
put it otherwise, what makes the social contract, the myth of political rationality, necessary?

The modern state, according to Max Weber is characterize by the monopoly of the legitimate use of force
over a given territory. To hold this monopoly is not simply to be in control of superior means of violence or
to be able to impose one’s will upon all others. It is not primarily to detain a physical power but a moral

11 For the idea that a founding myth provides the basis of the social order and places that order outside of all possible
revision see Gauchet (1997). Although Gauchet argues that putting the social order outside the scope of possible
revisions is proper to premodern societies and that modern societies are characterized by the fact that they make its
revision and criticism possible. However, see Dumouchel (2018b) for an analysis and criticism of Gauchet's
position. See Girard (1978) and (1987) for the idea that a central aspect of any social order and the myth that founds
it is to institute the distinction between good and bad violence.
12 More or less, from when the Athenian democracy was abolished by the Macedonians in 322 BC to the American
and French Revolutions towards the end of the 18th century.
13 Not so long ago, shortly after the fall of the USSR, Francis Fukuyama equated the advent of universal democracy
with the end of history. Our political thinking is suffused with idea that there can be nothing beyond democracy and
that all countries that are not yet democracies will sooner or later become democratic.
14 The answer cannot simply be to project a respectable international image because many of these countries, for
example North Korea, are not interested in projecting a respectable image relative to human rights or to the rule of
law or even to any other aspect of democracy but the fiction that they represent the will of the people.

4
authority. The authority to distinguish between the violence that is good, constructive, protective, sometimes
recommended even and the violence that is bad, that is destructive, murderous, and forbidden. It is also, as
mentioned earlier, to institute this moral distinction. To make it a reality rather than a mere idea or judgment.
Within a society at any time many individuals, groups and institutions publicly claim the moral authority to
distinguish between good and bad violence. For example, religious groups, established codes of morality,
traditional customs, or respected individuals who take positions concerning current events. However, in
modern nation states and societies only the state can actually perform that distinction. In the sense that
whatever action the states determines as bad violence, becomes such, becomes a crime and those acts of
violence which it defines as the legitimate use of force become good violence. To say that the state has not
only this moral authority, but its monopoly means that its authority extends to every possible act of violence.
The state may allow some groups or institutions that, unlike the army, various police forces, border guards,
or courts of justice, are not expressions of its monopoly to determine in some circumstances the distinction
between good violence and bad violence, for example the family or educational institutions. It retains
nonetheless the power to regulate their ability to make that distinction and to overrule their decisions.

The distinction between good and bad violence which the state operates can of course be challenged. Its
content can be discussed and put into question in thoughts and in words, in which case however the
monopoly itself remains unchallenged. It can only be challenged through an illicit act of violence that
proposes to establish a different demarcation between good and bad violence. Not every act of violence of
course is an attempt to formulate in a different way the distinction between good and bad violence. To the
opposite, acts of violence normally fall on one or the other side of the received distinction and in the process
re-assert, rather than contest its relevance and decisions. In order to constitute a challenge to the state’s moral
monopoly the act of violence must gain a moral authority of its own. This it does when it is recognized as
good violence by others, by persons who did not perpetrate the violence but find that the action was in some
way justified. The violence that was committed then becomes something else than just a crime. Once others
identify to some extent with the perpetrators and their action, approving of it, in a sense recognizing it as
their own, the violence acquires legitimacy. This agreement confers upon the action a moral authority that
challenges the state’s moral monopoly of the legitimate use of force. What was a crime becoming perhaps
not quite good violence, but it stops being merely bad, criminal violence and turns into an act of political
violence.

Political violence challenges to the state’s moral monopoly to distinguish between good and bad violence
reveal what underlies this monopoly. The ground on which rests the moral authority of the state is the same
as that which provides a justification to political violence. Common, but in this case nearly universal,
agreement to recognize as good that violence which the state prescribes or authorizes and to reject as bad that
which the state declares criminal. Such a recognition is not a purely intellectual act. It involves a willingness
to participate in the violence which the state projects as good and to refrain from the violence that it
condemns. The social contract is not a pact in which people renounce their violence, but one where, as does
the chorus towards the end of Aeschylus Oresteia, they vow the pledge of common hate and common
friendship. The basis of the state’s authority is not people’s rational abandon of violence, but their
willingness to take its violence as their own. It is this willingness that grounds its power and its moral
authority.

Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) claims that there is no right reason established by nature. To illustrate this
lack of an authoritative reason by nature, he offers the example of two mathematicians who disagree about
some result.15 The "ablest, most attentive and most practiced men may deceive themselves and infer false
conclusions" Hobbes writes. His point is not that men are naturally irrational, but that anyone, even the best
and most rational can make a mistake. Given that, individual appeals to reason in situations of conflict will
not be sufficient to resolve the dispute. "The parties must by their own accord," adds Hobbes, "set up for
right reason the reason of some arbitrator, or judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their
controversy must either come to blows or be undecided for want of a right reason constituted by nature; so it
is also in all debates of what kind soever." (1651:111) Reason's ability to counter violence and to be an
alternative way to resolve conflicts and disagreements requires an authority which it does not provide by
itself.

15 It is interesting that Hobbes was involved in many mathematical controversies during his life.

5
The claim is further developed in a later chapter, 13, “On the natural condition of mankind". There he argues
that in the absence of a judge to whose sentence all will stand, rational arguments can lead to more conflicts
and to an augmentation of violence. If on the one hand Hobbes identifies three causes of quarrels in the state
of nature are, first competition, the desire to possess what others possess, second diffidence, the fear that
others will come and attack, to which the best defense is a preemptive attack, and finally glory, which resorts
to violence in response for any imagine affront. On the other hand, he shows that for each step up that road to
greater and apparently less rational forms of violence, there is a rational explanation that justifies the
intensification of violence. In his text, the explanation of men's violence and conflict in terms of passions
cannot be distinguished from its explanation in terms of rational self-interest (1651:184-185). This implies
that in the state of nature rational arguments, are not only unable to protect us from violence, but that they
provide justifications leading to its augmentation. In such a situation where a recognized authority is lacking
not only rational behavior cannot be clearly distinguished and set apart from irrational behavior, but the
opposition between reason and violence also collapses and disappears.

The tradition that opposes reason to violence commonly views reason as an external source of authority that
can guide us to avoid the trap of reciprocal violence and conflict. Hobbes's claim is that reason by itself does
not constitute such an external source of authority. He suggests that the authority of reason is not prior, but
that it is consequent to the establishment of a sovereign power. That it is engendered by the operation that
constitutes the power that holds the moral monopoly of the legitimate use of force. It is not reason that
showed us the way out of violence. It is because there is a power to whose sentence we all stand, that reason
has an authority that can be opposed to violence. Hobbes's position however is complex and ambiguous
because he also argues that the contract takes place because people are rational. It follows that in his text,
reason on the one hand legitimizes the contract, grounds the power that emerges from it as well as its
authority and opposition to violence. On the other hand, it is that power which makes reason possible in its
opposition to violence.

The way out of Hobbes's ambiguity is to recognize that what makes possible the authority of reason in its
opposition to violence is the active presence of the moral distinction between good and bad violence,
between violence and the legitimate use of force. Some may wish to claim that there is no good violence, that
the use of force is never legitimate. Perhaps. However, it must be remembered that the distinction between
good and bad violence is not a mere intellectual operation. It cannot be reduced to the cognitive act by which
we separate the motives, reasons, and circumstances where the use of force is legitimate from those where it
is unjustified.16 As the analysis of political violence above shows, what is involved in the moral distinction
between good and bad violence is different. It is not the intellectual cognitive process by which one discovers
some truth -- that this violence is justified; what is involved is to approve and to refuse, to endorse and to
reject some acts of violence. The reasons why different agents approve of the violence that was committed
may be more or less good, and certainly vary between them, but it is their approval, not their reasons which
makes the violence good and transforms what was merely a crime into an act of political violence.

This approval functions very much like what in speech act theory we call a performative. Just as when the
chairperson declares "the meeting is now open" she gives existence to a meeting that did not exist before, the
approval makes the distinction real. More than it declares that this violence is good, it legitimizes, authorizes
the action, and in consequence makes its repetition easier,17 because it removes from the act the stigma of
illegitimate violence. As Bourdieu (1975) aptly points out certain social conditions are necessary in order for
language to be efficacious. That is, in order for performatives to perform the action which they perform, for
example, to marry, to condemn or to promise. The meeting is only open if the sentence above was uttered by
a duly authorized person, and most likely if other conditions were also satisfied, for example, that the
quorum was reached. The same applies to the case of violence. The approval and rejection only institute the
difference between good and bad violence if certain conditions are satisfied. The most basic necessary, but
not sufficient, condition is that of plurality.

16 Note that in this last case the very term we use to discriminate within violence between what can and what cannot
be justified, imply the existence of reason in some form, imply that it is possible to provide justification of certain
actions.
17 See for example Midlasky (2005:43-63) on the importance of 'validation' - tacit approval through impunity - in
legitimizing violence against minority groups.

6
An act of violence is not good if you are the only one who approves of it, because violence is by nature
exerted by someone against someone else.18 This means that its value is always contested and that the contest
concerning the value of an act of violence is inseparable from the violent conflict itself. It is further very
often violently that a person contests the value of the violence of which he or she is the victim. Therefore, it
is others who were not necessarily involved in the conflict, but who must inevitably become concerned by it,
who ultimately make the violence good or bad. They are the ones whose approval tips the balance19 on one
side or the other. In order for the violence to become good, rather than simply 'not-entirely-bad' as is often
the case with political violence, the agreement should be as near unanimous as possible. Ideally, it
corresponds to what Girard (1978) (1987) defined as unanimity minus one. The 'one' being the victim of all
others, whose violent destruction ensures that unanimity is now perfectly realized. Violence becomes good,
morally good that is, when it is unanimously approved or endorsed by a community. Girard hypothesizes that
such a phenomenon of violent unanimity engendered by a spontaneous social mechanism of contagion first
instituted the opposition between good and bad violence as a moral distinction.

The opposition between good and bad violence, in a sense, always exists because it is inscribed in the very
structure of any act of violence. The violence that I exert is good, unlike the violence that I suffer, which is
bad. However, this opposition cannot be a rational distinction as long as it constantly changes depending on
individuals and circumstances. In order to become a rational principle of action it must gain some stability. In
order to be able to guide an agent's actions and decisions, the opposition must tell her or him more than the
simple distinction between me and the other. It needs to perform a meaningful partition of the world. One
which allows individual agents to evaluate their actions not only in relation to themselves. However, since
we are dealing here with the actions of agents relative to each other, rather than with given states of affairs,
the distinction must in some way constraint the agents’ actions. Otherwise, it will have no take on reality.
This it does when it becomes a moral distinction that posits a set of forbidden actions from which agents
should refrain. It is because it constrains the actions of agents and is not simply a hypothesis about the world
that the distinction between good and bad violence can guide people in their choice of action.

A central characteristic of this moral rule, as of any other, is that it is always possible to accomplish the
actions which it forbids, and that those which it prescribes do not, in consequence of this approval, become
inevitable. A moral rule is neither a law of nature, nor a technological constraint. It does not identify specific
features of the material world, and it does not implement an inescapable mechanism. Thus, it can always be
transgressed. Because they have the double characteristic that, on the one hand, once instituted do not simply
become another feature of the world, and on the other hand do not correspond to a mere cognitive distinction
that leaves the world unchanged, they make rational action possible. Once established the moral opposition,
unlike the simple cognitive distinction, between good and bad violence provides a non-subjective evaluation
of (some aspect of) the world. An evaluation that will often be in contradiction with agents' subjective
interests, and which the individual needs to take into account in a specific way, because it is always possible
for him or her to transgress that rule. Cognitive hypotheses about the world can be either true or false. If true,
they reveal features of the world that either limit the subject's action or may constitute opportunities. In any
case they are constraints to which one must adapt, but they do not force the agent to look at the world from a
point of view that is not his or her own.

Reason requires persons to be able to look at the world from a point of view that is not entirely or exclusively
subjective. This is clear even, or perhaps especially, when rationality is conceived as maximizing a utility
function. Though an agent who is maximizing utility or his or her gain is in a sense acting subjectively, he or
she can only act successfully to the extent that his or her outlook is not exclusively subjective. The agent
must be able to order his or her goals in a way that is not independent of, but that cannot be reduced to the
subjective order of his or her preferences.20 To succeed in maximizing a utility function the agent must be
able to order alternatives in a way that reflects the structure of the world and the interactions between
different actions, choices, and decisions. Failure to do that will defeat his or her effort at maximizing utility.
Reason requires agents to develop a non-entirely subjective point of view on the world. All such points of
view are not necessarily rational in themselves, adopting one nonetheless constitutes a necessary

18 Either directly or indirectly as when it is exerted against objects that belong to another or that he or she value and
cherish in some way.
19 Tips the balance not necessarily of the act itself, that is of who won and who lost, but of who was right.
20 This cannot easily be formulated within economic theory because agents' preferences, if rational, are assumed to
reflect that objective order of which he or she has complete knowledge.

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precondition of rationality.21 Once instituted the moral distinction between good and bad violence provides
such a non-subjective point of view that fulfills that essential precondition of rationality.22

However, the opposition between reason and violence requires more. The moral distinction between good
and bad violence by itself is insufficient. The dichotomy of reason and violence requires that someone holds
the monopoly of the use of good violence. In premodern societies this condition is never satisfied. many
institutions, for example rules of vengeance, sacred rituals and prescriptions, traditional customs, family
relationships and clan affiliation, contribute to separating good violence from bad violence. These different
sources of moral authority enact the distinction in various, sometimes overlapping domains. The issue is not
that these multiple sources of authority are necessarily in competition with each other, but that there are
many. Good violence comes in many guises and so does bad violence, and the forms of transgressions that
justify recourse to force are numerous. Neither good nor bad violence are 'one thing', a unified phenomenon
to which reason may easily be opposed. Once there is a holder of the monopoly of the legitimate use of force,
the situation changes. Violence can become a simple term that designates a complex reality which previously
could only be described by using many different terms, like sacrifice, honor, vengeance, initiation, or glory.
When the authority of that monopolistic power is seen as grounded in reason, reason becomes or can
function as the opposite of violence.

The dichotomy of reason and violence then is not only a purely conceptual distinction. It also corresponds to
a historical construct that rests on particular socio-cultural and political conditions, foremost on the existence
of a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. 23 The rational fiction of the social contract and the
dichotomy of reason and violence tend to minimize and to hide the violent dimension of that monopoly,
presenting its foundation as a renouncement to violence that elects reason as the means to resolve conflicts.
Especially, they dissimulate that the violence of the state is ultimately our own, that its agents commit by
proxy. This means that the dichotomy of reason and violence rests on violence, more precisely on a particular
institutional way of managing internal violence and projecting it outward. Its dependence on violence does
not entail that the abstract truth of the opposition between reason and violence also depends on that
institutional arrangement, but the social efficacy of reason as an alternative to violence does depend on the
existence of that monopoly, depends on the violence which it exercises both outside and within the limits of
the territory it controls.

Central to the above interpretation is the idea that when we set up a state endowed with the monopoly of
legitimate violence, we do not renounce our own violence, but transfer it to the state, in the sense of
recognizing as our own the violence which the state prescribes and perpetrates. Every state train and
maintain specialists of violence, border guards, police forces, secret services, the army and other branches of
the military. Internally the state is peaceful when most citizens (and residents) approve of the violent
behaviors of these specialists. This violence may take many forms, discrimination, police brutality, secret
surveillance and repression, expulsion of migrants and foreigners, severe economic inequality and
deprivation, legal punishments, and exterior military operations. Historically, the polities that first
institutionalized this monopoly also developed unprecedented means of destruction and projected their
power across the globe creating immense colonial empires. Colonies where they exerted violence in ways
which they judged unacceptable among each other, but which they thought was justified in this different
domain because of the locals' supposed lack of rationality, as Hegel for example does in his lectures on the
philosophy of history. Thus, if within individual modern European and North American nation states the
dichotomy between reason and violence and the institution that made it possible functioned to guarantee
peace, if it restricted and constrained the use of violence among them, outside of these privileged territories,
in the colonies it served to justify unlimited violence.24

21 For a more detailed explanation of this necessary condition see Hampton (1998) and Dumouchel (2018a).
22 Girard (1987) argues that the self-regulatory mechanism of violence that gives rise to the sacred instituted the
distinction between good and bad violence as the first moral distinction of humankind. This is certainly a highly
debatable empirical hypothesis which it is not necessary to accept to receive the point made in the text, which is
simply that the distinction between good and bad violence is a moral distinction that force agents to adopt (at times)
a non-exclusively subjective point of view on the world.
23 As I analyze in Dumouchel (2015) the existence of a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is itself the result
of a set of complex social and cultural historical conditions.
24 See Mbembe (2000) for a penetrating analysis of how the lack of reason attributed to Africans by Europeans
functioned as a justification of the unlimited violence exerted against them.

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The approval of the state's use of force consolidates the distinction between good and bad violence which the
state through its monopoly actualizes and makes concrete. It is what grounds and gives social efficacy to the
dichotomy between reason and violence. It offers to individuals under its rule non-violent means of resolving
their conflicts. To the opposite, when the monopoly is challenged by violent action that threatens the state's
moral authority, the distinction between good and bad violence becomes blurred and the opposition between
reason and violence is weakened. This process of transformation is visible, or implicit, in many political
studies on order and conflict.

Often, for rather evident reasons, these studies start from a situation where political violence is already under
way and the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of force challenged.25 They try to understand, generally
using some version of rational choice theory, why, for example, insurgents opted for violence rather than
some other form of political action. Alternatively, they seek to determine which conditions are needed in
order for the two parties to engage in a negotiated settlement. In most cases the explanation ultimately takes
the form of a more or less complex cost-benefit analysis where violence constitutes a rational option if the
expected gains are greater than the expected cost.26 Here the dichotomy between violence and reason has
disappeared, violence is a rational option or not depending on its expected gain.

Such analyses also apparently overlook the distinction between good and bad violence, perhaps it in an effort
to be value free. The distinction however is implicitly present in the concept of order as a preferred state of
affairs. Though opponents disagree about what that order is, both want order to prevail in the end. To put it
otherwise, the (political) choice of violence can only be rational if it is instrumental, if it has a goal that is not
the violence itself. The distinction between good and bad violence in this case becomes the distinction
between violence that is rational and the violence that is not. That is why though the dichotomy between
reason and violence has been dissolved, the opposition itself remains present in modified form. The
opposition itself, however, can also be challenged, as shown by some attempts to explain more extreme
forms of violence.

Wintrobe (2006) for example proposes analyses of some extreme, apparently meaningless episodes of
violence and terrorism. According to him, these instances of excessive, at first sight completely irrational
violence can be understood as rational efforts by perpetrators to maximizes their gain in different
circumstances of political conflicts. Their action is rational to the extent that, in spite of its highly destructive,
seemingly wanton and needlessly cruel character the violence has a goal which it actually promotes.
However, the question that needs to be asked is can that goal be just anything at all or are there some
constraints on the types of objectives that can constitute a possible goal that renders rational such outrageous
violence. Note that we are now far away from the principle of proportionality mentioned at the beginning of
this article. What is required is not that there be some proportion between the importance of the goal and the
dimension of the violence, but simply that the violent act promote the agent's subjective utility. The question
is, are there any constrains or limits on what that goal can be? If the answer is negative, then there can be no
distinction between violence and reason, and no distinction between good and bad violence.

In a subjective theory of utility, the agent's goal can be whatever brings him or her the highest expected
utility and the action whatever allows the agent to reach that goal with the highest probability. Since
interpersonal comparison of utility are in theory impossible, it follows that the goal pursued by the violence
can be what the agent determines it to be. The action chosen by the agent is rational if, by his lights it has the
highest probability of bringing about the end which for that agent has the highest expected utility. Given that
interpersonal comparisons of utility are ruled out, we cannot make any judgment on what the utility of any
given end is for one or more other agents. It follows that it is impossible to judge from the outside the
rationality of the action and we need to take the agent's word that this is the action that has the greatest
expected utility for him or her. Imagine then, that the option which has the highest subjective utility for an
agent is the death of the prime minister, and the action that has the highest probability of fulfilling that goal

25 Though to my knowledge organized violence against the state, for example, terrorism, civil wars, insurgent groups,
in such studies is never presented as a challenge to the states moral monopoly of the use of legitimate force.
26 It is clear that in such analyses that, what is to be included among expected gain and cost, especially what should be
overlooked as externalities rather than counted as cost, is fundamental.

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is for the agent to blow the explosive belt he or she will be wearing when the prime minister comes to shake
hands. Is it rational then for the agent to blow himself up?

It seems that within the purview of a subjective utility theory the answer should be 'yes'. On what ground
could we declare it irrational? If such is the case, then apparently any action that can be described as
purposeful is rational. 27 Rationality so conceived has lost all normative value, and nothing allows us to
distinguish or oppose it to violence. When we reduce rationality to purposeful action we limit the judgment
of rationality to the exclusively subjective point of view of the agent, preserving it, and preserving him or her,
from any possible external criticism. Is rational any action of an agent that the agent claims is rational.28 With
the loss of its opposition to violence, reason also loses its ability to provide non-violent solutions to conflicts.
Whether or not something is rational cannot anymore be an argument towards the solution of a disagreement,
because opposed claims of rationality can do no more than leave opponents on their position.

The dichotomy of reason and violence is not a mere timeless abstract opposition. It is a historical and
institutional distinction whose capacity to protect us against violence depends on specific social and cultural
conditions that may fail to be satisfied.

References

1 - Boucher D. & P. Kelly (eds.) (1994) The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, London: Routledge.

2 - Bourdieu, P. (1975) "Le language autorisé note sur les conditions sociales du language rituel" in Actes de
la recherche en sciences sociales, novembre 1975 5/6:183-190.

3 - de Sousa, R. (2007) Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind, Oxford University Press.

4 - Dewyn, M. (2020) "La théorie de la guerre juste et l'utilisation des drones armés: l'application des
principes du jus in bello" in Ceulemans, C., M. Dewyn, D. Lambert, M. Ruffo & P. Warnotte (eds.)
Robotisation des armées enjeux militaires, éthiques et légaux, Paris: Économica. pp. 104-123.

5 - Dumouchel, P. (2018a) “Rationality, Irrationality, Realism and the Good” in (G. Bronner & F. Di Iorio,
eds.) The Mystery of Rationality, Cham: Springer, p. 53 – 66.

6 - ---------------- (2018b) "Politics and the permanence of the sacred" in (Wydra, H. & B. Thomassen, eds.)
Handbook of Political Anthropology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 115-126.

7 - ------------- (2015) The Barren Sacrifice an Essay on Political Violence, (M. Baker, trs.) East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press.

8 - Dunn, J. (2019) Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, Pinceton University Press.

9 – Gauchet, M. (1997)

10 - Gigerenzer, G & R. Selten (eds.) (2001) Bounded Rationality The Adaptive Toolbox, MIT Press.

11 -Girard, R. (1987) Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Stanford University Press.

12 - ---------- (1978) Violence and the Sacred, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

13 - Hampton, J.E. (1998) The Authority of Reason, Cambridge University Press.

27 Some philosophers, for example de Sousa (2007), consider purposeful action to be the definition of minimal or of
categorial rationality. Though de Sousa (2007:32) seems to believe that this conception of rationality is nonetheless
minimally normative. For a criticism see Dumouchel (2018a).
28 Note that accepting that claim involves a performative contradiction.

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14 - Hobbes, Th. (1651) Leviathan (C.B. Macpherson, ed) London: Penguin Books 1976.

15 - Honderich T. (2003) Terrorism for Humanity, London: Pluto Press.

16 - Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, London: Penguin Books.

17 - Mbembe, A. (2000) De la postcolonie, Paris: Karthala.

18 - Midlarsky, M.I. (2005) The Killing Trap Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University
Press.

19 - Nozick, R. (1993) The Nature of Rationality, Princeton University Press.

20 - Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press.

21 - -------- (1985) "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical" in Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:223-
252.

22 - --------- (1971) A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press.

23 - Scheper-Hughes, N. & Ph. Bourgeois (eds.) (2004) Violence in War and Peace, Oxford: Blackwell Press.

24 - Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice, London: Allen Lane.

25 – Wintrobe, R. (2006) Rational Extremism: The Political Economy of Radicalism, Cambridge University
Press.

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