Reimagining the Social Bond: Review of Kevin Duong's The Virtues of Violence

Abstract

Reimagining the Social Bond:Review of Kevin Duong's The Virtues of Violence Marieke Mueller (bio) and Robert P. Jackson (bio) Kevin Duong. The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France. Oxford Oxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp. £36.45 (hc). ISBN: 9780190058418. Social contract theory has tended to associate violence with chaos, disorder, and irrationality. In The Virtues of Violence, Kevin Duong directs us towards an alternative lineage of "redemptive violence" that is inherently neither illiberal, nihilistic, nor anti-democratic. It responds rather to a problem identified with (nineteenth-century French) modernity: "democratization as an experience of social disintegration" (128). In various guises, thinkers have diagnosed the dissolution of inherited social bonds as having the potential for social atomization and moral fragmentation. Redemptive violence derives its appeal from its attempt to regenerate or redeem a "thick" social bond, i.e., a form of fraternity [End Page 716] or solidarity, enabling a multitude to achieve popular self-government through unifying collective self-transformation. In the French Revolution, the imperial conquest of Algeria and the 1871 Paris Commune, images of redemptive violence are marshalled to constitute and redefine the boundaries of a sovereign "People." For Duong, the French republican tradition is paradigmatic, because of the clarity and self-consciousness of its theorists, who made explicit these problems of democratization. This type of violence is of particular interest because it appears across the spectrum of political thought and therefore, he argues, speaks to the character of the modern democratic experience. To comprehend the pervasiveness of this form of violence in "France's long nineteenth century" (168), Duong undertakes four impressively researched and thoroughly readable studies. In each, Duong examines an episode of redemptive violence: Jacobin interventions in debates about the regicide of Louis XVI, Tocqueville's justification of "total war" in colonial Algeria, the Communards' conception of the "people in arms," and appeals for moral regeneration among diverse critics of the Third Republic in the years preceding the First World War. Duong suggests that the idiom in which the problem of social disintegration is expressed in these moments can be linked to contemporaneous developments in scientific discourse. Thus, the Jacobins employ metaphors of natural catastrophe to describe the action of the people, Tocqueville interweaves new theories of psychological fragmentation with those of social disintegration, and Bergson's vitalist critique of positivism is politically weaponized by thinkers like Sorel. Chapter one analyzes the relationship between social bonds and violence that emerged during the French Revolution. Duong establishes the wider intellectual landscape: in the eighteenth century, he argues, the disappearance of the corporate system and the questioning of the ideology of the "king's two bodies" as guarantor of social cohesion (36), raised the question what new social bonds could look like. Events such as the storming of the Bastille and the women's march on Versailles, according to Duong, "cemented the link between popular agency and violence" (28). This link was crystallized in debates about the prosecution of Louis XVI. Duong contrasts the Girondins' legalistic approach with the Jacobins' concern that the king's trial further the Revolution's task of "reconstructing the moral foundations of the social" (37). In short, a violent attack on the king's body was needed for a new social body to emerge. Duong's nuanced depiction of the Jacobins and their arguments for regicide might surprise some readers: interested in concrete social bonds and not abstract ideals as is conventionally assumed (38-9), the Jacobins mobilized a religious vocabulary sacralizing regicidal violence while adopting naturalistic images such as lightning to portray democratic agency. The second chapter examines Tocqueville's concern that individualism reduces social bonds to a "société en poussière." Duong understands Tocqueville's solution, the creation of social bonds through "modern national glory," in the context of Cousin and Guizot's rejection of Lockean "sensationalism" (55, 62). Instead of viewing humans as fragmented bundles of sense perceptions, these thinkers respectively stress the subject as "unified volitional power" and the interdependence of social and inner life. Tocqueville concluded that the people had to relearn to exert a collective will, which could best be achieved through pursuing national glory. On Duong's reading, Tocqueville...