A phenomenon like increased public violence is not likely to be one with a simple explanation. It is more likely that a complex interrelationship of several factors, among them historic, sociological, and economic. Here, it seems the greatest contributors to this trend were; the demobilization of a rootless, recently defeated, often armed, group of young men (a population more often disposed to violence than others); increased ethnic heterogeneity with new or redrawn national borders; and the influence of certain romanticized notions of violence "from above."
On the first and second points, I think Gerwarth and Horne make several very persuasive arguments in their article on paramilitarism as a direct contributor to the increase in violence in the postwar period. Describing the large group of recently demobilized soldiers, they write, "Together they formed explosive subcultures of ultramilitant masculinity in which brutal violence was an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, form of political expression.[1] Here, the example of the Freikorps in revolutionary Berlin and Munich and these men's deployment against the revolutionaries is probably the most prominent. Gerwarth and Horne write later in their piece, "In other parts of Eastern Europe, however, the violence was less ideological, remaining more concerned with interethnic rivalries or the territorial borders of new nation-states."[2] Here, the authors' examples of violence during the dissolution of British rule over (most of) Ireland or the almost immediate ethnic violence emerging in the new Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats are informative examples.
On the third point, a direct relationship is more difficult to draw, in part because evidence of the influence of philosophy on middle- and working-class men is difficult to track. Nevertheless, given his influence on prominent postwar leaders like Mussolini and his participation in Action Française, it is difficult to exclude the influence of Georges Sorel on this process. Charles Maier writes, "The task of Sorel's famous myth, with its incitement to class tension and creative violence, was to reinvigorate the elites as well as the proletarian challengers. Both Sorel and Pareto shared a new and still unusual bourgeois hostility to liberalism. Yet it was significant that in decrying a crisis of European culture, they summoned up the rhetoric of class confrontation. Social conflict had become preoccupying enough to call into question the entire legacy of Enlightenment rationality and humanism."[3]
The point here regards not only Sorel's appeal to the redemptive power of violence, which informed certain leaders' willingness to deploy it when unnecessary, but also the larger issue of a retreat from Enlightenment solutions to social problems that had been ensconced within the framework of liberal democracy as the Age of Reason's crowning achievement.
On the first and second points, I think Gerwarth and Horne make several very persuasive arguments in their article on paramilitarism as a direct contributor to the increase in violence in the postwar period. Describing the large group of recently demobilized soldiers, they write, "Together they formed explosive subcultures of ultramilitant masculinity in which brutal violence was an acceptable, perhaps even desirable, form of political expression.[1] Here, the example of the Freikorps in revolutionary Berlin and Munich and these men's deployment against the revolutionaries is probably the most prominent. Gerwarth and Horne write later in their piece, "In other parts of Eastern Europe, however, the violence was less ideological, remaining more concerned with interethnic rivalries or the territorial borders of new nation-states."[2] Here, the authors' examples of violence during the dissolution of British rule over (most of) Ireland or the almost immediate ethnic violence emerging in the new Yugoslavia between Serbs and Croats are informative examples.
On the third point, a direct relationship is more difficult to draw, in part because evidence of the influence of philosophy on middle- and working-class men is difficult to track. Nevertheless, given his influence on prominent postwar leaders like Mussolini and his participation in Action Française, it is difficult to exclude the influence of Georges Sorel on this process. Charles Maier writes, "The task of Sorel's famous myth, with its incitement to class tension and creative violence, was to reinvigorate the elites as well as the proletarian challengers. Both Sorel and Pareto shared a new and still unusual bourgeois hostility to liberalism. Yet it was significant that in decrying a crisis of European culture, they summoned up the rhetoric of class confrontation. Social conflict had become preoccupying enough to call into question the entire legacy of Enlightenment rationality and humanism."[3]
The point here regards not only Sorel's appeal to the redemptive power of violence, which informed certain leaders' willingness to deploy it when unnecessary, but also the larger issue of a retreat from Enlightenment solutions to social problems that had been ensconced within the framework of liberal democracy as the Age of Reason's crowning achievement.
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[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 498.
[2] Ibid, 503.
[3] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), 23.
[1] Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, "Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923," Journal of Modern History, 83, no. 3 (2011): 498.
[2] Ibid, 503.
[3] Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1975), 23.
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