Violence and Society

Abstract

Man, according to Aristotle, is meant to live within a society1 . To maintain society, people developed a system for keeping the peace, a system of law. Codified by kings and rulers, these laws created a sense of order. However, the truth is a bit more complicated. The city is inherently mixed with violence. Sometimes, the violence is the prompt for creating a city. Other times, violence exists to enforce boundaries within it, to establish law and order. And in alternate cases, it is there in order to maintain the city itself. These three ideas- foundation violence, boundary violence and defensive violence- appear throughout myth and history. Over the course of this essay, I will demonstrate how the city is also mixed up with violence from the bloody founding of cities through the story of Cain and Abel, to the importance of establishing limits through violence via Romulus and Remus, to three outsider/ defenders of the city who used violence- Samson from the Bible’s Book of Judges, Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s play and Abraham Lincoln.