Vengeance: The fight against injustice PDF
Preview Vengeance: The fight against injustice
Vengeance Second Edition Clytemnestra kills Cassandra with a two-edged axe. Attic Kỳlix, around 430 B.C. Ferrara, National Archeological Museum . VENGEANCE The Fight Against Injustice Second edition PIETRO MARONGIU AND GRAEME R. NEWMAN HARROW AND HESTON Publishers New York Philadelphia Australia Copyright ©2019 Harrow and Heston Publishers, for Pietro Marongiu and Graeme R. Newman. First edition originally published in the United States of America in 1987 by Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949880 ISBN: 9780911577006. The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous. —Psalms 58: 10, 11. Acknowledgments WE ARE IN DEBT to more persons than it is possible to mention because they have contributed to the birth and development of the many ideas contained in this book. Each of us, however, wishes to mention some special people who have helped make this book possible. Pietro Marongiu thanks Giovanna Montgomery who, since the project’s beginning, has provided constant support and unswerving confidence, helped him through the most difficult periods, and ensured this volume’s successful completion. He would also like to thank Duilio Casula, Rector Magnificus, University of Cagliari. Graeme Newman thanks his wife Joan, and their children Tamsin, Clancy, and Amanda for putting up with his preoccupation with vengeance, and for being understanding about the time spent writing when other more rewarding activities of family life took second place. Both authors are especially appreciative of the support of their mutual friend Franco Ferracuti, University of Rome. The desolate landscape of Sardinia, the School of Criminal Justice of the University of Albany, and downtown Manhattan provided almost ideal environments where most of our work was accomplished. PIETRO MARONGIU GRAEME NEWMAN New York City Contents Introduction to the Second Edition ..............................................1 Introduction................................................................................. .....19 1 The Elementary Sense of Injustice ..........................................27 2 Vengeance as Anger ..................................................................42 3 From Vengeance to Justice .......................................................54 4 Vengeance and the Sacred: Dante’s Inferno ..........................66 5 Vengeance and Responsibility: Hamlet’s Procrastination ..................................................78 6 Cultures of Vengeance...............................................................87 7 The Political Economy of Vengeance ...................................108 8 Vengeance as Protest: Jesse James and the Bandit Legend .............................121 9 Brokers of Vengeance: The Mafia ........................................143 10 The Lone Avengers: An Impossible Mission ...................165 Conclusion .....................................................................................183 Index ...............................................................................................189 Foreword THE LORD, THROUGH MOSES. commands: “Thou shalt not avenge” (Lev. 19:18). Further, the Apostle Paul quotes Him, “Vengeance is Mine” (Rom. 12:19). Often these passages are interpreted as a repudiation of vengeance as morally wrong. This is incorrect. The Lord clearly reserves vengeance to Himself. The ancient notion of Hell—everlasting punishment—certainly indicates that He means it, that those who unrepentantly violate His commands will be punished with relentless severity. The divine wrath lasts forever—there is no parole from hell. Further, the Apostle Paul does not object to vengeance when carried out on this earth provided it is not done privately but by authority. “The ruler,” he writes in the same epistle to the Romans (13:4) is “a revenger [meant to] execute wrath on him that doeth evil.” Despite biblical support, vengeance has acquired a bad reputation in modern times. It is, at best, regarded as a barbaric and irrational relic, disruptive of social life, morally unjustifiable, and repudiated by everyone formally in authority, as well as by those who aspire to moral authority, e.g., clergy. Yet, oddly, revenge lives on, as Graeme Newman and Pietro Marongiu make abundantly clear. Why does it? What social and psychological functions does vengeance have? What transformations did it undergo? Can it be morally justified? How, finally, is vengeance related to other social institutions and functions? The authors of this thought provoking and engaging book ask these questions within a rich historical and conceptual analysis. Their answers are tentative and often quite frankly speculative. Given the subject, it could not be otherwise. But both the questions and the answers are never less than stimulating. We owe much gratitude to these diligent scholars who have taken it upon themselves to explore a difficult and unpopular subject and to remind us that, like it or not, disguise it every which way, or admit it candidly, the desire for revenge for any injury, real or fancied, is universal. We will cope with it the better the more we learn about it. Vengeance: the Fight Against Injustice can teach us a great deal about a shared and important human disposition, the understanding of which is indispensable if one wishes to understand history and human nature. ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG Introduction to the Second Edition WHEN THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN over thirty years ago, we defined vengeance as a universal reaction to a perceived, unjustified suffering inflicted on the individual or group. We affirmed that such reaction invariably arose from an elementary sense of injustice, a primitive feeling that one has been arbitrarily subjected to a tyrannical power against which one is powerless to act. Vengeance is therefore a punitive act of coercion motivated by the elementary sense of injustice (chapter 1). In our view this definition still holds. Other general definitions of vengeance, while sharing the basic concept of punishment for a perceived wrong, common to all vengeful acts, focus attention on other key features of the phenomenon. It has been regarded as a “spontaneous” and “innate” form of aggressive reaction; an explosion of destructive impulses that are activated by special circumstances, usually those perceived as threatening survival.1 Both biological and cultural explanatory models have been used to explain vengeance.2 Biological models maintain that vengeful aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition, a built-in mechanism that automatically reacts to a perceived threat to one’s life or well-being. If such a reaction occurs promptly after the attack, it is unclear whether it is a self-defense or retaliatory behavior. The retaliatory nature of the action becomes clear if the reaction is delayed and planned in order to be executed at a more opportune and convenient time. However, vengeance is very often (indeed, typically) carried out in cold blood, well after the aggression has taken place, thus it cannot to be regarded simply as self-defense 1 2 VENGEANCE —SECOND EDITION against an actual or immediate threat. In this sense, revenge evolved primarily as a utilitarian or forward-looking deterrence mechanism, aimed to prevent the attackers from repeating the harmful action.3 Yet vengeance, in general does not seem, at first glance, to produce any tangible advantage for the retaliator. On the contrary, depending on the gravity of the act, the consequences can be very serious. However, we will see in this book that people consider this costly and destructive behavior as acceptable and even necessary, and there are many individual and socially perceived advantages in engaging in such behavior (chapters 6 and 10).4 Vengeance is by definition an act of retaliatory aggression: any behavior that is intended to inflict both physical and psychological harm upon another individual (or group) against their will. A useful distinction can also be made between physical and non-physical vengeance that will cover all types of willfully inflicted harm, both by the author and by the avenger. Physical vengeance is an aggression that involves the intentional use of physical force in order to harm others physically.
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