Synopses & Reviews
What, James Tyner asks, separates the murder of a runaway youth from the death of a father denied a bone-marrow transplant because of budget cuts? Moving beyond our cultureandrsquo;s reductive emphasis on whether a given act of violence is intentionalandmdash;and may therefore count as deliberate murderandmdash;Tyner interrogates the broader forces that produce violence. His uniquely geographic perspective considers where violence takes place (the workplace, the home, the prison, etc.) and how violence moves across space.
Approaching violence as one of several methods of constituting space, Tyner examines everything from the way police departments map crime to the emergence of andldquo;environmental criminology.andrdquo; Throughout, he casts violence in broad termsandmdash;as a realm that is not limited to criminal acts, and one that can be divided into the categories andldquo;killingandrdquo; and andldquo;letting die.andrdquo; His framework extends the study of biopolitics by examining the stateandrsquo;s role in producing (or failing to produce) a healthy citizenry. It also adds to the new literature on capitalism by articulating the interconnections between violence and political economy. Simply put, capitalism (especially its neoliberal and neoconservative variants) is structured around a valuation of life that fosters a particular abstraction of violence and crime.
Review
andldquo;This is a very important and timely book. Tyner has produced a cutting-edge appraisal of the relationship between violence and capitalism. His analysis is astute, meticulous, and penetratingandmdash;coaxing readers to reconsider most of what we thought we knew about the nature of violence. Violence in Capitalism is a powerful book from one of the disciplineandrsquo;s most inspired minds, advancing an argument that will undoubtedly set the pace for a great deal of scholarship to follow.andrdquo;andmdash;Simon Springer, author of Violent Neoliberalism: Development, Discourse and Dispossession in Cambodia
Synopsis
How did the French Revolutionaries explain, justify, and understand the extraordinary violence of their revolution? In debating this question, historians have looked to a variety of eighteenth-century sources, from Rousseau's writings to Old Regime protest tactics. A Natural History of Revolution suggests that it is perhaps on a different shelf of the Enlightenment library that we might find the best clues for understanding the French Revolution: namely, in studies of the natural world. In their attempts to portray and explain the events of the Revolution, political figures, playwrights, and journalists often turned to the book of nature: phenomena such as hailstorms and thunderbolts found their way into festivals, plays, and political speeches as descriptors of revolutionary activity. The particular way that revolutionaries deployed these metaphors drew on notions derived from the natural science of the day about regeneration, purgation, and balance.
In examining a series of tropes (earthquakes, lightning, mountains, swamps, and volcanoes) that played an important role in the public language of the Revolution, A Natural History of Revolution reveals that understanding the use of this natural imagery is fundamental to our understanding of the Terror. Eighteenth-century natural histories had demonstrated that in the natural world, apparent disorder could lead to a restored equilibrium, or even regeneration. This logic drawn from the natural world offered the revolutionaries a crucial means of explaining and justifying revolutionary transformation. If thunder could restore balance in the atmosphere, and if volcanic eruptions could create more fertile soil, then so too could episodes of violence and disruption in the political realm be portrayed as necessary for forging a new order in revolutionary France.
About the Author
James A. Tyner is a professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University. He is the author of several books, including War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, winner of the Meridian Book Award from the Association of American Geographers, and Iraq, Terror, and the Philippinesandrsquo; Will to War.