This interview was conducted by Javier Toro.
Paul Hollander is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Center Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. His most recent book is From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship.
I have written a great deal about political violence in connection with political systems, but I had never tried to come up with a definition of political violence. I thought it was fairly obvious. It is violence that has political roots, motives or justifications. You know what violence is. Then [...]
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Translation:
From my point of view, violence is part of animal nature: the death of an animal by another animal of its own or different species, for a thousand reasons associated with survival, call for hunger, survival of the fittest, power, etc. The civilizing process in Homo sapiens is aimed precisely at replacing natural violence, barbarism, and coexistence, in a delicate balance. And totalitarian regimes or the like tend to push back the process of formation in civility and citizenship, to roll back the most primitive basic instincts.
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