Gewalt: Monopol, Delegation, Partizipation

Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the author of this chapter in the edited volume Gewalt: Entwicklungen, Strukturen, Analyseprobleme (Violence. Developments, Structures, Analysis Problems), argues that society cannot part with the basic idea that violence must be monopolized by the state for the protection of all. But looking back on the past century, we have experienced this monopoly of violence as the actor of mass murders without precedent. For him this is still the main task of all theory that deals with supra-individual violence: What is the means, without which we still do not believe that we can successfully contain violence, the state monopoly of force, a source not limitless, but during the Holocaust and in other cases of genocide extending the destructiveness in an previously unknown way?