Commissioned Book Review: Jenny Pearce, Politics Without Violence? Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment
| Author | Valeria Guarneros-Meza |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920963819 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP13 –NP14
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
963819PSW0010.1177/1478929920963819Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Politics Without Violence? Towards a Post-
Weberian Enlightenment by Jenny Pearce.
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 342 p., £59.99
(hardback), ISBN 978-3-030-26081-1/978-3-030-
26082-8 (ebook)
In this book, Jenny Pearce invites readers to
think about politics without violence. She
argues that academics and practitioners are
accustomed to understand politics as violence
because of the deep legacies left by the classical
political-science understandings of the state
and its monopoly of violence. To break with
this pattern, she proposes a post-Weberian
enlightenment as a way forward. She argues
that politics without violence shall re-found
social relationships in ways which recognise
and bridge individuals’ biological and somatic
experiences with social bodies and the body
politic. By balancing reason against the under-
standing of human emotions, violence can be
diminished and help designify other expres-
sions of violence (beyond the physical), whose
meanings connect with somatic experiences.
She argues that this new, emotional enlighten-
ment is important to ‘prevent us addressing vio-
lently the conflicts and problems facing people
and planet in the twenty-first century’ (p. 307).
Recent debates on the violence incurred by
water scarcity and the management of the
COVID-19 pandemic through ‘war’ narratives,
illustrate the value and timeliness of the book.
The book is a heavily theoretical exercise
based on an amazing and innovative interdisci-
plinary dialogue between political science,
sociology, anthropology, history, psychology,
epigenetics and neuroscience. Pearce claims
that without this level of interdisciplinarity, it
would be impossible to develop the post-
Weberian enlightenment. The author takes the
reader into a journey of designification or
deconstruction of mainstream understandings
of political violence. The first five chapters do
this by presenting the understandings of vio-
lence in the work of classical theorists (Hobbes,
Weber, Schmitt). Pearce argues that their work
is problematic because it is ‘highly selective’
of the ‘violences it considers matter to politics’
(p. 19). This selectivity relies in the monopoli-
sation of violence by the state, which histori-
cally has been founded on humans cooperating
with each other to preserve specific groups’
power and assets (p. 163). Building upon the
work of historians and theorists (Foucault,
Elias, Mann, Pinker), Pearce claims that the
state’s monopolisation of violence puts order
to other violences which dominant groups have
failed to acknowledge. She underlines the lack
of universality of state monopolisation to con-
texts beyond Western and male-dominating
understandings.
To overcome the limitations of the classics,
the book gradually interacts with the work of
modern theorists (Arendt, Mouffe, Fanon) who
help her to introduce emotions into the analyses
of politics, by identifying the links between
individuals’ bodies and their relationships
between each other as ways of finding identity
and sense of self. To make these bridges, Pearce
dives into the work of neuroscientists (Niehoff,
Barrett) to understand the relationship between
aggression and violence to show how social
experiences of aggression reshape the neuro-
transmitters’ composition of our biological
bodies. The scientist-based claim that the body
is vulnerable to the effects of the social world is
particularly relevant for Peace’s broader work
(beyond this book), which has been critical of
governments’ failed approaches when over-
looking care-giving policies to tackle youth or
gender violences in Latin America.
In the second half of the book (chapters
6–11), Pearce builds on the limitations but pre-
dominant understandings about the state’s
monopolisation of violence. She centres on
humanity’s ‘ontological incapacity to avoid
fighting each other’, which indicates that ‘vio-
lence as a phenomenon all but disappears’ (p.
192). This argument in policy terms is well
illustrated on the discussion about homicide
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