Here are 100 books that On Violence fans have personally recommended if you like
On Violence.
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I have always loved asking the big questions. What is justice? What is freedom? How should we live? I’ve been lucky to turn these questions into a career teaching philosophy, and I’m always inspired by authors who ask “Why?” in ways that shift our paradigms and broaden our minds. I’m also passionate about women who ask these questions—for too long, women were excluded from philosophy and not taken seriously when they wanted to know why. I loved writing a biography of Lydia Maria Child. So my list includes books by and about women like her: smart, witty, powerful women who ask why. Here’s to asking more questions and finding better answers!
This book challenged so much of what I thought I knew about American slavery. Harriet Jacobs was born enslaved in North Carolina. She dared to ask why she should not have the same freedom as her enslavers; ultimately, she escaped to the North and fought for her children’s freedom from there. I loved the way she challenged her readers to face their complicity in the system that enslaved her.
I especially admired the powerful rhetoric that allowed her to be accommodating to her readers while also demanding that they confront slavery’s evil and change their lives accordingly. I felt like it explained so much to me about why the US is the way it is, and it inspired me to work for my country’s ideals.
The true story of an individual's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and freedom, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains among the few extant slave narratives written by a woman. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North. Written and published in 1861 after Jacobs' harrowing escape from a vile and predatory master, the memoir delivers a powerful and unflinching portrayal of the abuses and hypocrisy of the master-slave…
In 1964, the FBI found smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were driving before they disappeared at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived in Mississippi as a volunteer to assist Black civil rights…
I’m a teacher, a student, and a reader by trade (that is, a university professor), and I spend most of my time trying to understand social and political power: why some people have it, and others don’t, how it circulates and changes (gradually or suddenly), why it sometimes oppresses us and sometimes liberates, how it can be created and destroyed. I mostly do this by reading and teaching the history of political theory, which I am lucky enough to do at McGill University, in conversation and cooperation with some wonderful colleagues.
I think Scott is one of the most creative social scientists working today, and this book is probably his strongest work.
Scott flips the script and focuses attention on the strategies subordinates use to navigate and deal with the power of their social superiors. He has great faith in the abilities of ordinary people to mock and hoodwink the powerful and to create for themselves little refuges from kings, bosses, and overlords.
I go back to this book all the time because it is a treasure trove of wonderful anecdotes, too.
"A splendid study, surely one of the most important that has appeared on the whole matter of power and resistance."-Natalie Zemon Davis
Confrontations between the powerless and powerful are laden with deception-the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery. Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power. These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant. At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule…
I’m a teacher, a student, and a reader by trade (that is, a university professor), and I spend most of my time trying to understand social and political power: why some people have it, and others don’t, how it circulates and changes (gradually or suddenly), why it sometimes oppresses us and sometimes liberates, how it can be created and destroyed. I mostly do this by reading and teaching the history of political theory, which I am lucky enough to do at McGill University, in conversation and cooperation with some wonderful colleagues.
I have spent more time with this book than with probably any other, and I still learn new things from it all the time.
Parts of it are very hard, but that’s because Marx is trying to show how the whole world is put into motion by economic power, money, and competition. But he also knows how to liven up even very technical parts of the argument with dark humor, arresting images, and biting sarcasm.
'A groundbreaking work of economic analysis. It is also a literary masterpice' Francis Wheen, Guardian
One of the most notorious and influential works of modern times, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership throughout the world,…
An eyewitness account of the first major international war-crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg trials, Twilight of Impunity is a gripping guide to the prosecution of Slobodan Milošević for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed during nearly a decade of wars in the former Yugoslavia.
I’m a teacher, a student, and a reader by trade (that is, a university professor), and I spend most of my time trying to understand social and political power: why some people have it, and others don’t, how it circulates and changes (gradually or suddenly), why it sometimes oppresses us and sometimes liberates, how it can be created and destroyed. I mostly do this by reading and teaching the history of political theory, which I am lucky enough to do at McGill University, in conversation and cooperation with some wonderful colleagues.
I am blown away by the scope, detail, and rigor of Patterson’s scholarship.
I think it is easy to imagine that slavery is a simple thing, treating a person like property and forcing them to work. But Patterson showed me that slavery has always been an entire system of meaning, ritual, and social dynamics.
I especially appreciate that Patterson demonstrates the ultimate perversity of the delusion that you could master other people.
Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association
In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.
Praise for the previous edition:
"Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and…
I am Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales UK and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. I am someone who has been interested throughout his career in all aspects of what used to be called the European Renaissance and especially in establishing a dialogue between cultural debates raging four hundred years ago and those which dominate our own everyday lives in the twenty-first century. In the past, my work has addressed ideas, for example, concerned with social theory, the construction of cultural space, and the significance of memory.
This book is a meditation on the ways in which violence has come to shape everyday life in the modern age, from the international political stage to scenes of our own daily routines.
Particularly poignant and thought-provoking are Žižek’s considerations of how inactivity, passivity, and reluctance to engage may ultimately be the most violent courses of action to adopt.
I am Professor of Early Modern Literature at Bangor University, Wales UK and Research Fellow at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Âge Classique et les Lumières, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France. I am someone who has been interested throughout his career in all aspects of what used to be called the European Renaissance and especially in establishing a dialogue between cultural debates raging four hundred years ago and those which dominate our own everyday lives in the twenty-first century. In the past, my work has addressed ideas, for example, concerned with social theory, the construction of cultural space, and the significance of memory.
This is now a well-recognised and established intervention in the ongoing debate about the status and function of violence of life in society.
Simmel makes particularly telling points in his discussion of the ways in which group identities may be forged and maintained through violent action and the costs that may be incurred by resisting such social practices.
I developed a strong interest in current events, especially politics, in high school. What the government does, or does not do, struck me as a vital piece of the puzzle in trying to explain why things are the way they are. That soon led, however, to seeing how the past continues to influence the present. No decade is more important than the 1960s for understanding our current political climate.
On May 8, 1970, just days after the killing of four college students at Kent State University, construction workers in New York City violently attacked a group that had gathered to protest the Vietnam War.
Kuhn offers a riveting account of the events (dubbed the “Hardhat Riot” by some and “Workers’ Woodstock” by others), but he also situates them into a broader story of how the war and other developments of the 1960s exacerbated divisions within the Democratic Party between white, heavily unionized blue-collar workers in the urban North and an emerging class of college-educated professionals.
Nixon successfully courted many of the blue-collar workers on the way to his landslide victory in 1972. Kuhn is no apologist for the workers, but he also avoids facile stereotypes about the white working class, some of which persist to this day.
In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protestors bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was happening; Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story-how chaotic it was, when it began, when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed. It was unthinkable one generation before: FDR's "forgotten man" siding with the party of Big Business and, ultimately, paving the way for presidencies…
I have been researching and writing about the era of the American Civil War for something over half a century. My passion for the subject remains strong today, having just published my seventh book. Given the seemingly endless amounts of material from soldiers and civilians alike, I have enjoyed deeply researching neglected subjects and writing about them in a way that appeals to both historians and general readers. For me the Civil War never grows stale, there are always little-used sources to research and fresh ideas to consider. The American Civil is omnipresent in my life—not excluding weekends and holidays!
From its wonderfully apropos title to its cautionary final paragraph, The Calculus of Violence is a deeply thoughtful and original analysis of who was killed and did the killing in the American Civil War—and why.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean argues that a very bloody civil war could have been much bloodier. The book is powerful but never preachy because complex human beings with complex beliefs and motivations are always at the forefront. This superb work forces readers to rethink many supposedly settled questions about the American Civil War.
Winner of the Jefferson Davis Award Winner of the Johns Family Book Award Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award
"A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War." -Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox
Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg-tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is…
As an equipment operator for the Army Corps of Engineers, I didn’t serve in a “combat” role, per se, but the engineers go wherever the military needs things built, so we were often repairing IED damage, hauling supplies outside the wire, or fortifying bases so the infantry, cavalry, etc. could do their job effectively. Coming home, I owe a lot of my successful reintegration to my writing and the many people who encouraged me to share it with the world. Now with my Master of Arts in English, I’ve taught college courses on military culture, and I present for veteran art groups, writing workshops, and high schools and colleges around the country.
Grossman is a former Army Ranger who digs deep into the psychological impact of taking human life through countless interviews with fellow soldiers of all kinds. Combining these accounts with thorough psychological research, Grossman comments on society's collective aversion to killing while helping us understand its complicated acceptance—and even encouragement—of wartime killing. What was most surprising to me was that historically, only about 4% of soldiers even fire their weapon during war, and how obviously that skews from the “norm” of combat portrayed in popular media. It’s an honest, eye-opening, and important piece of work that should be required reading for every service member, police officer, or anyone tasked with carrying society’s heaviest burden.
The good news is that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to kill in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The psychological cost for the rest of us is even more so: contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army's conditioning techniques and, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's thesis, is responsible for our rising rate of murder among the young. Upon its first publication, ON KILLING was hailed as a…
I am a Canadian writer, teacher, and mother with Norwegian and Scottish ancestry. Since my twenties, I have been fascinated by ancestral memory, what Martha Graham (a late great dance pioneer) called ‘blood memory.’ Having spent many years in dance and therapy, diving into my own unique somatic symptoms, I started to realize that my mother’s (and grandmother’s) traumas were entwined and entangled with my own and that my body was holding on to all of it. What a relief to discover the research of transgenerational epigenetics! This curiosity fueled the narrative of my debut novel, Becoming Leidah, allowing me to explore Norse and Celtic mythology, as a way to speak about very personal truths.
A memoir that blends science and history with myth and memoir, Susan Griffin’s writing is like sinking into deep water to find buried treasure. Every time I pick this book up (again and again), I find relevance, for my own family and the world around me, particularly related to the earthquake that truth-telling has for individuals, families, and nations. It reminds me that interconnectedness is not just an image or an idea; the web of our lives is created and held together by the secrets we keep, and the truths that inevitably surface after years of denial.
Written by one of America's most innovative and articulate feminists, this book illustrates how childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspirations, and public personae all assume undeniable roles in the causes and effects of war.
