The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Roger Lane

Professors Eric Monkkonen and Eric Johnson, editors of The Civilization of Crime, have long belonged to what was originally, in 1973, known as "the Dutch Group," which has metamorphosed into the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice; Monkkenon has been especially active in keeping the more parochial members of the Social Science History Association in touch with their counterparts across the water. These ten essays on English and West European subjects is one fruit of this longterm exercise in networking. This assessment will follow the inescapable formula for reviewing an anthology: a capsule description of the central purpose, a wholly inadequate sketch of the separate contributions, a reluctant, head-shaking pronouncement that the lot is both "uneven" and not as coherent as might be, a few quick summary judgements, a concluding wish for what-might-have-been.

The Introduction seems to bear Monkkenon's imprint more heavily than Johnson's. What holds (most of) the lot together, it points out, is that with the weight of a great deal of historical evidence it pounds what is surely the last nail into the coffin of the idea that city is inherently more violent than countryside. In addition, in the course of showing that the longterm trend in crime has clearly been down, at least for what in the Anglo-American American tradition are defined as common law crimes of violence, several of the essays challenge the theoretical arguments of the usual dead Germans and Frenchmen - Marx, Tonnies, Weber, Durkheim, even Foucault. The editors and some others suggest instead an alternative theorist, the largely neglected Norbert Elias, whose two German language volumes on The Civilizing Process, originally written in the 1930s, were published in English in 1982.

Elias argued that since the Middle Ages a "civilizing process," originating in the growing power of the state, above all its increasing monopoly on arms and violence, has acted to curb impulsive individual aggressivness. The key period was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the leading actors princely courtiers, followed by city folks. Eventually most of us, with the state as superego, have learned to behave in more rational and less routinely and impulsively violent fashion. In practice not all of these essays rely upon or even mention Elias. In Part I, however, "Longterm Assessments: The Middle Ages to the Present," two of the three do so, notably Pieter Spierenberg's "Longterm Trends in Homicide: Theoretical Reflections and Dutch Evidence, Fifteenth to Twentieth Centuries," which despite its title is far more concerned with careful methodology in reliably establishing criminal statistics (concentrate on homicide, ignore infanticide, use the equivalent of coroner's body counts rather than court figures) than in placing them within any single interpretative framework. Eva Osterberg, in "Criminality, Social Control, and the Early Modern State: Evidence and Interpretations in Scandanavian Historiography" has some reservations about the "civilizing process;" the changing function of the courts, from forums for the settlement of individual disputes to bureaucratic agencies of social control, is her main focus. And in Sweden, at least, the seventeenth-century era of the greatest growth in state power was a notably bloody one, in large part because of the depredations of soldiers, in and out of service, on their own nationals. James Sharpe, in "Crime in England: Long-Term Trends and the Problem of Modernization" mentions Elias not at all; his concern is less to establish than to attack a thesis, the notion of "modernization." "Modernization" theory, which he identifies as a contemporary, (largely American), version of ideas variously outlined by Marx, Weber, and Tonnies, would suggest that feudal violence, or interpersonal crime, was over time replaced in the Bourgeois Era by property crime. While not wholly incompatible with Elias, this idea was not in fact his, and in any case Sharpe demonstrates pointedly that such a transition never occured.

A focus on attacking existing theories rather than constructing bold new ones characterizes most of the essays here, and in fact more than Elias what may be said to unite a good half of them is that, like Sharpe, they devastate the idea of a transition "de la violence a la vol," a thesis which Jan Sundin, in "For God, State, and People: Crime and Local Justice in Preindustrial Sweden" identifies not with American academics but with French. While the ten scholars here represent six nations: England (2), Italy, Israel, the Netherlands (3), Sweden (2), and the U.S., and they deal with several more than that, it is perhaps significant that the Modern Motherland of Theory contributes none of them. Only one, Esther Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, deals with France at all; her article on "The Hundred Years' War and Crime in Paris, 1332-1488," leads off Part II, "Shorter-Term Assessments: Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries."