Baked In? Political violence and the American nation
Join us for the inaugural POLIS Lecture. Our esteemed speaker is Desmond King, Andrew W Mellon Professor of American Government at Oxford.
Date and time
Thursday, November 6 · 4 - 6pm GMT
Location
SG1/ SG2, Alison Richard Building,
7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Register now
Abstract:
Max Weber defined the modern state as having a monopoly on legitimate violence. Not in the United States. The American regime organized and defended popular violence right from the start. The American Constitution –driven by both historical necessity and political theory-- institutionalized an armed citizenry. The Constitution, interacting with slave codes in the south, institutionalized the violence that was already endemic in colonial America and projected it into the future. We argue that as the state slowly developed its own capacity for legitimate violence it operated in a unique dialectic with the citizen violence that the state itself had organized. The development of the American state’s capacity continues to the present day. The Trump administration vastly expands the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus and projects it onto the reluctant cities in the American homeland – unsettling established ideas (and legal boundaries) but following a logic that was present from the start. We offer a framework for understanding how the state interacts (and patterns) private violence across four broad categories: Delegation, exemption, enforcement, and repression; all are complicated and driven forward by American federalism.
Speaker Bio:
Desmond King is the author of 13 books, 9 coedited books and numerous articles and chapters. Amongst other findings, King's research has demonstrated the influence of New Right ideology in the Reagan and Thatcher eras (The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship Dorsey 1987), the evolution of modern conservatism in the United States (coed. The Changing Character of the American Right Vols 1 & II , PalgraveMacmillan, 2025), the significance of segregation in the US federal government (Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government, OUP 1995/2007 2n ed), the national bases of American identity (The Liberty of Strangers, OUP 2007), the malign influence of eugenics on North American social policy (with Randell Hansen, Sterilized by the State Cambridge UP 2013), the expanson of executive power in the American state (with Stephen Skowronek and John Dearborn, The Deep State versus the Unitary Executive: Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic, OUP 2021), the of institutions in comparative labour market policy (Actively Seeking Work: The Politics of Workfare in hte USA and Britain Chicago 1995), and the politics of the Federal Reserve quantitative easing programmes (with Larry Jacobs, Fed Power: How Finance Wins OUP 2021), how a dichotomy between protect and repair policy alliances now drives the politics of civil rights (with Rogers M Smith, America's New Racial Battle Lines: Protect versus Repair, Chicago 2024). polity. King's op-eds have appeared variously in Le Monde Diplomatique, the New York Times and the Financial Times.
He is an elected fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.