Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: I was recently at a local burger shop when two strangers started to argue about their place in the queue.Their tones escalated, one swore at the other, tension mounted and although I wondered whether violence might ensue, it did not.Randall Collins's newest book, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, asserts that only a small portion of the population is involved in violence and an even smaller percentage is actually competent at it.Collins argues that existing theories all proceed from a false premise: violence is easy to do.He argues that violence is, in fact, difficult and best understood by analyzing the micro-situational dynamics that engender it.If the assumption that violence is easy is false, as Collins argues, evolutionary theory and macrolevel sociological theorizing cannot accurately dissect violence and its causes.Evolutionary theory mistakenly assumes that human genes are somehow primed for violence.But physiological responses to violence such as urinating, vomiting, and sweating challenge biological explanations.Furthermore, Collins suggests that even if some individuals are predisposed to anger, this does not explain why they are only violent sometimes, or why nonangry people can be violent.In fact, Collins asserts that humans have evolved specific traits that make fighting difficult, not easy: "we've evolved in such a way that fighting encounters a deep interactional obstacle, because of the way our neurological hard-wiring makes us act in the immediate presence of other human beings" (p.27).His focus on interactions also challenges macrosociological theories of violence that assume violence is easy once motivation exists.Replying to this, and supporting the methodological and ontological foundation of his book, Collins argues that an analysis of violence must concentrate on the foreground, i.e., the situational dynamics, not background factors.After all, no social group has a monopoly on violence and no group practices violence to the exclusion of nonviolent behaviour.Collins builds his thesis on the foundation of the theory of interaction ritual that he has constructed over the past few decades.Premised on Durkheim's concern with the ritual production of solidarity, and Goff-
DOI: 10.29173/cjs4430
Author: Paul Armstrong
Institution: University of Toronto
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2153216142