Punitive States: Punishment and the Economy of Violence

Are there distinctive postmodern forms of punishment? Is the contemporary 'punitive' turn in the United States a sign of things to come in Europe? Is modern rationality at odds with violence, or the means to applying violence systematically?Punitive States links together these key contemporary debates in criminology, penology and social theory and offers an alternative analysis inspired by Georges Bataille and Rene Girard. The book concludes with three dramatic case studies that relate the foregoing arguments to contemporary cultural forms and political decisions.

Introduction; Modernity, violence and the civilising process; Modernity reconsidered and condemned; Reclaiming modernity; Rethinking violence in modernity; The case for a postmodern penality; State violence, masculinity and the flight from the feminine; A honeymoon in Auschwitz; Monstrous doubles