4 - Revenge and the Fallibility of the State
The Problem of Vengeance and Democratic Punishment Revisited, or How America Should Punish
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The effect of these cruel spectacles, exhibited to the populace, is to destroy tenderness or excite revenge; and by the base and false idea of governing men by terror instead of reason, they become precedents. It is over the lowest class of mankind that governance by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel that they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practice.
– Tom Paine, Rights of ManIt should now be clear that the grief-driven need to remake memory, to overcome the past completely; to destroy one's antagonists utterly is disturbingly authoritarian. On a personal level such vengeance does seem to proceed at the expense of reason and of truth. As it becomes dominant within American culture, altering its practices of punishment and changing its perceptions of justice, it appears to be systemic vengeance of a different order, a vengeance which is at odds with democratic justice itself.
But what can it mean to say that vengeance has this character, or that it is undemocratic when there has clearly been so much of it in democracy? From the French Revolution to the uprisings of New England, the cause of democracy has always had its vengeful side. While democracy has aligned itself with ‘reason’ and ‘rights’ against revenge, those very things have justified democratic revenge and revolution.
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- Information
- The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice , pp. 145 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008