Honors 155 – Great Issues in the Social Sciences
Law’s Violence: Punishment, Culture, and Society

Spring 2004

William Rose
Robinson Hall 320
Department of Political Science
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This course will look at the place and politics of violence in late modern law and society. The story of history we tell ourselves as (liberal) subjects of modernity is usually a story with noble beginnings and a happy ending. But, what if Nietzsche were right? That is, what if our ‘civilization’ is conditioned by the enjoyment of cruelty? In other words, what if conditions of modern life are founded on the logic of violence?

We are often told that written law, and governmental institutions that enforce those laws, are modern strategies to protect people from unrestrained violent acts that can occur within our society. However, to establish legal justice, government officials depend, ultimately, on their capacity to mobilize violence. In this class, we will explore the character of law’s violence and how that violence may compromise the goals of justice. We will pursue these themes through a directed examination of the place and purpose of punishment in society.

Required Texts:
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
Mitchell, The Book of Job
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

Course Requirements:
Students are required to attend class and expected to participate in class discussions. Constructive, informed participation that contributes directly to conversations about the course material will raise borderline grades; lack of attendance and/or participation may result in a lower grade. Further, you will be required to write three papers (10-12 pages each) during the term. Each paper will constitute one-third of your final grade. The papers will be in the form of an extended response to a question that I will direct to you at various points during the term.

Course Overview:
From the Gospel of Matthew to George Bernard Shaw and former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, many have remarked that how, when, and why a society punishes reveals its true character. Punishment then tells us who we are. The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, its understandings of mercy and forgiveness, and its particular ways of responding to evil. This class will address three fundamental questions about the relationship between law, punishment, and violence:

1.) What is punishment and why do we punish as we do? Punishment involves the imposition of pain in a calculating and deliberate manner. To acknowledge this fact locates the subject of punishment in relation to significant political and ethical issues; e.g., how do we deploy political and legal power in defining the limits of freedom? What justifies legal restrictions on our conduct? What are the responsibilities of those who punish in relation to those subject to punishment?

2.) What can we learn about politics, law, and culture – in the United States and beyond – from an examination of a particular society’s practices of punishment? For example, how have issues of punishment figured in our ‘national story’? What are the arguments that today shape our thinking about punishment?

3.) What are the appropriate limits of punishment? Do we punish too much, or too little? Are we too strict, or too forgiving? What is the appropriate relationship of punishment and mercy? Are there some acts which strain our capacity to make judgments or for which punishment, no matter how severe, seems an inadequate answer?

Course Outline:
I. Introduction
A. Whose Law, Which Justice?
1. Antigone (video)
2. Plato, Crito (handout)
3. Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience”
4. King, “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail”

B. Law’s Violence
1. The Ox-Bow Incident (video)
2. Kozinski, “Tinkering with Death”
3. Kafka, The Trial (excerpts – hand out)

II. Basic Questions
A. What is Punishment About? On the Imposition of Pain
1. Mitchell, The Book of Job
2. Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata
3. Noon Wine (video)
4. Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy”
5. Garvey, “Punishment as Atonement”

B. What Does Punishment Say About Those Who Punish?
1. Slingblade (video)
2. Morris, “Persons and Punishment”
3. Connolly, “The Desire to Punish”
4. Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

C. What is to be Punished, and in Whose Name?
1. M (video)
2. Robinson v. California
3. Penry v. Lynaugh
4. Kansas v. Hendricks
5. Payne v. Tennessee

D. Is Death Different?
1. Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”
2. Berns, For Capital Punishment (excerpts)
3. Blackmun (dissenting), Callins v. Collins
4. Gov. Ryan, “Speech in Defense of Commutation Decision”

III. Punishment and Modernity
A. Evil and the Limits of Punishment
1. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

B. Thinking Against Modernity
1. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Modernity