THE BEST OF TIMES

Have homicide rates followed an eight-hundred-year decline from the Middle Ages? A careful study of the sources suggests nothing of the sort.

PART TWO OF THREE

READ PART I HERE

For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. “The people of the Middle Ages were, in a word, gross.”^[2]Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 83.

Gross?

They ate with their hands, blew their noses with their fingers, belched copiously at table, and “took only perfunctory measures to keep their coitus private.”^[3]Ibid., 85. Pinker is writing about the Christian Middle Ages, a period not ordinarily known for its sexual exuberance. “It is part of the essence of humans to be ashamed of their nakedness,” … Continue reading

In time freed from public fornication, the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were occupied in killing one another in tavern brawls or over tavern wenches; at the dinner table, lacking access to the fork, they used their knives to settle slights as well as scores.^[4]No forks? Really? See Pasquale Marchese, L’invenzione della forchetta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 1989). The fork is in any case no measure of dining delicacy. Many refined cultures eat … Continue reading

How they made time to eat remains a mystery.

In an essay entitled “Interpersonal Violence in English Society: 1300-1980,” Lawrence Stone argued that homicide rates in Britain were in the past very much higher than they now are.^[5]Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1980,” Past & Present 101, no. 1 (1983): 22–33. The same author’s The Past and the Present Revisited (London: Routledge, … Continue reading Crime is not the historian’s habitual prowling ground; Stone’s essay served to anoint criminology with the oil of his unexpected approval.^[6]For a historian such as Lawrence Stone to regard with satisfaction a decline in homicide within the context of the twentieth century rather suggests a physician remarking to a patient suffering from … Continue reading What had caught Stone’s eye was an essay published in 1981 by Ted Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence.”^[7]Ted Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence,” in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, eds. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (Chicago: University of … Continue reading Gurr wrote as a scout for scholars, and in his interpretation of thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century English history, he relied upon two sources: James Given’s Stanford Ph.D. dissertation, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England,^[8]James Buchanan Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977). For an initial review of Given, see Thomas Green, “Review of Society and … Continue reading and Carl Hammer’s essay, “Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-Century Oxford.”^[9]Carl Hammer, “Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town: Fourteenth-Century Oxford,” Past & Present 78, no. 1 (1978), pp. 3–23. The incidence of homicide in Britain, Gurr argued, Stone wallowing manfully in his wake, “has fallen by a factor of at least ten to one since the thirteenth century.”^[10]Gurr, Op. cit., p. 295. Quoting an imprecisely identified 2002 work by Pieter Spierenburg, Schwerhoff asks, “Was the long-term decline of violence, from the 14th to the middle of the 20th century, … Continue reading Gurr illustrated his essay by a brilliantly simple graph. No one could fail to appreciate its meaning. When it came to murder, what had been up had come down. Some twenty-two years after Gurr published his essay, criminologist Manuel Eisner reported that he could see just what Gurr had seen: a striking 800-year decline in the English homicide rate. Gurr’s original essay, Eisner remarked, “easily qualifies as one of the most influential studies in the field of history of crime research.”^[11]Manuel Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” Crime and Justice 30 (2003), pp. 83–142. In a more recent paper, entitled “From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in … Continue reading

Gurr’s essay has by now become that rarest of things in historical scholarship: it is its own best source.

The thesis that there has been an 800-year decline in homicide owes much to the peculiar circumstance that Gurr’s essay has been widely read but rarely studied. Beyond arguing broadly that down is down, Gurr did not argue much at all. The curve that connects Gurr’s data points was, as Gurr suavely affirms, drawn by hand. It has no statistical justification. Data points between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are missing. Both Oxford and London diverge widely from what would appear to be the mean homicide rate for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and London in the fourteenth century diverges from itself by a factor of three. Although Gurr’s diagram covers eight hundred years, it lacks intra-century markers. To the right of the diagram, there is an incomprehensible squiggle. Of the diagram’s twenty-one data points, only four are labeled. None is sourced, Gurr appealing both to Given and to Hammer as if they shared joint ownership of his graph. Given based his study on medieval Eyre court records; Hammer, on medieval coroner rolls. There is “no other medieval document,” Hammer commented in defense of his choice, “which can bring us closer to the truth of the matter.”^[12]Hammer, “Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town,” 7; see also n3. The methodological discrepancy between Given and Hammer is not one that Gurr mentions.

Of the cities represented on Gurr’s graph, it is fourteenth-century Oxford that has caused a number of eyebrows to hoist themselves up: H/P = 121 per 100,000.^[13]Michael Shermer is an example. Called upon to review The Better Angels of Our Nature in The American Scholar (Autumn 2011), he thought to entitle his review, “Getting Better All the Time.” Were … Continue reading This figure brings medieval Oxford into companionship with various exhilarating Latin American drug domains. A careful scholar, Hammer understood that these figures were absurd. Medieval Oxford was a young man’s town; murder is a young man’s game. Hammer addressed this problem by asking what the homicide rate for Oxford would have been were Oxford’s population represented by an age-adjusted population?

If, on this basis, we were to calculate a revised or adjusted homicide rate (victim) we would arrive at a figure of 60 to 80 per 100,000 for a normal population, still very high but exceeding experienced rates in large American metropolitan areas by no more than about three or four times. No doubt there are neighborhoods in New Orleans, Atlanta or Detroit, many times larger than medieval Oxford, the homicide rates of which match or exceed that of the medieval borough. [emphasis added]^[14]Hammer, “Patterns of Homicide in a Medieval University Town,” 12–13.

Since they were less alarming in fact than they became in fiction, homicide rates in medieval Oxford have become grimmer in the telling. To Hammer, the original sources suggested a neighborhood of New Orleans, Atlanta, or Detroit; to Gurr, “a society in which men… were easily provoked to violent anger and were unrestrained in the brutality with which they attacked their opponents”;^[15]Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” 307. to Stone, “the highest homicide rates recorded anywhere in the west”;^[16]Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society,” 30. and to Pinker, no doubt, a region of Gehenna.

James Given wrote as a student of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English Eyre courts.^[17]English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Adrian Jobson (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2004) is valuable for an account of C. A. F. Meekings’s archival research, which was incomplete at the … Continue reading Instruments of royal justice, Eyre courts convened in English shires at intervals ranging from months to years. They served to settle on terms favorable to the Crown both civil and criminal pleadings, and, as Donald Sutherland has observed, their eagerness to see where money could be got lent to their proceedings an air of frank extortion.^[18]For Sutherland’s mature appreciation of the Eyre courts, see Donald Sutherland, “The Brotherhood and the Rivalry of English Lawyers in the General Eyres,” American Journal of Legal History 31, … Continue reading Introduced into the English legal system in the late twelfth century, Eyre courts disappeared at the end of the fifteenth, replaced for the most part by courts of Assize. Whatever their role in the complex administrative machinery of the English Crown, Eyre courts were not, with respect to homicides, close to the ground. They served a recapitulative function, leaving to local officials, coroners among them, the business of poking at the dead. Written in medieval legal Latin, Eyre court records were often written in different hands and in different inks, and they were covered with legal scribbles and annotations—the work, obviously, of clerks pressed for time and under pressure from the Crown. Presiding over the London Eyre court of 1271, Roger of Seyton was frank about the quality of his rolls: “I cannot vouch for them for various reasons, because sometimes one thing is done and another thing more or less is written in the rolls by the clerks, who continually fail to understand the lawyers and litigants correctly.”^[19]Introduction to The London Eyre of 1276, ed. Martin Weinbaum (London: London Record Society, 1976), xi–xl.

Given’s dissertation records his assessment of seven Eyre records: Bedford, Bristol, Kent, Norfolk, Oxford, Warwick, and London. The first record dates to 1202, and the last to 1276. It is Warwick in 1232 that is recorded as having the highest thirteenth-century homicide rate (H/P = 64 per 100,000), and Bristol in 1248 the lowest (H/P = 4 per 100,000). These rates depend on population estimates, and so on a choice of reference class. In the case of Bedford, Norfolk, Oxford, and Warwick, Given’s estimates were derived from the Domesday Book of 1086; and for London and Oxford, from Josiah Cox Russell’s British Medieval Population^[20]Josiah Cox Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948). and Rodney Hilton’s A Medieval Society respectively.^[21]Rodney Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Cen-tury (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). To make use of the Domesday Book, Given first multiplied its figures by five, and then by 2.5 percent per annum. This is in agreement with contemporary demographic analysis only to the extent that, if no one knows whether these figures are correct, no one knows that they are not. Russell’s population estimates were, on the other hand, based on the poll tax returns of 1377.

Medieval homicide rates are very sensitive to population estimates. Of course they are. In his study, Plantagenet England, Michael Prestwich found reason to revise previous population estimates for medieval London; and with previous population estimates, previous homicide rates.^[22]Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England, 1225–1360 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a review of Prestwich’s book, see Lorraine Attreed, “Review of Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet … Continue reading One estimate of London’s population in the mid-fourteenth century puts the figure between thirty-five and fifty thousand: H/P ≈ 44 per 100,000. The true population of London, Prestwich argued, was somewhere between one hundred and one hundred and seventy-six thousand inhabitants: H/P ≈ 18 per 100,000.

In an essay entitled “Peacekeepers and Lawbreakers in London, 1276-1321,” published in a recent volume of Thirteenth Century England, Henry Summerson, having examined the roll of crown pleas from the London Eyre of 1321, concluded that with respect to medieval London, H ≈ 15 per annum.^[23]Henry Summerson, “Peacekeepers and Lawbreakers in London, 1276–1321,” in Thirteenth Century England XII: Proceedings of the Gregynog Conference 2007, eds. Janet Burton, Philipp Schofield, and … Continue reading This makes for a homicide rate H/P ≈ 37.5 on the assumption that P = 40,000; H/P ≈ 15, on the assumption that P = 100,000; and H/P ≈ 8.571 on the assumption that P = 175,000. These uncertainties are ineliminable.

In 2012, the homicide rate in the District of Columbia was H/P ≈ 13.9. No one quite knows the population of medieval London, but the population of Washington, DC, is known to the last miserable miscreant.

There are sufficiently many population estimates at work in the study of medieval homicides to comprise a bouquet of them. And, of course, the various population estimates do not coincide. Why should they? They are each inadequate; but each is inadequate in its own way. Given alone reaches two quite different conclusions about thirteenth- century homicide rates: one based on his own estimates, the other, on Russell’s. The differences are dramatic. On Given’s population estimate, H/P = 64 per 100,000; and on Russell’s, H/P = 30 per 100,000.

This is hardly a trivial difference.

Bludgeoned, stabbed, bopped on the head, knifed, run through with a pike, pushed out of high windows, trampled in a frenzy, strangled, stuffed into wells, poisoned—the dead, in short, and so the reference attribute in any homicide rate. How many of them were there in a given year?

If it is not possible reliably to assess the size of thirteenth-century populations, then neither is it possible reliably to assess the number of thirteenth-century homicides. Given’s own estimates do very little to support the lurid thesis that “murderous brawls and violent deaths … were everyday occurrences in medieval England.”^[24]Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” 295 citing Given. They do nothing at all. Between 1227 and 1248, Given’s figures indicate that there were 16 murders in Bristol, a homicide rate of 4 per 100,000 per annum—hardly an everyday occurrence, and rather less than stimulating Miami’s murder rate of 15 per 100,000 between 1948 and 1952, or even Philadelphia’s homicide rate of 5.7 per 100,000 over the same four years. It hardly helps Given’s case that his arithmetic is incorrect. If the population of Bristol was 17,000 in 1248—his own figure—the five homicides he cites from the 1248 Eyre Court make for an annual homicide rate of 1.4 homicides per 100,000, and not 4 homicides per 100,000. The eleven homicides reported in the 1227 Eyre court record would make for an annual homicide rate of 3.8 homicides per 100,000, if they spanned twenty years; but since the 1227 Eyre court records homicides only up to 1227, the reader, consulting Given’s treatise, cannot know how many years were at issue before the previous Eyre court.

There were six, as it happened; but the 1221 Eyre court, the subject of a famous study by Frederic Maitland, was held in the county of Gloucestershire, and not in the city of Bristol. About the reliability of the rolls, Maitland very sensibly remarked that “as to the amount of crime that there has been very accurate statistics must not be expected, for it is clear that the same case is sometimes presented by more than one jury, and there are other obvious difficulties in the way of a precise computation.”^[25]Frederic Maitland, Pleas of the Crown for the County of Gloucester Before the Abbot of Reading and His Fellows (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 36. “Any one who is willing to take a little … Continue reading

In Table 1 of his dissertation, Given lists seven Eyre court records, together with their archival location. Eyre courts were held in London in 1244 and again in 1276, a lapse of thirty-two years. But, oddly enough, Given asserts that only twenty-four years elapsed between the Eyre court of 1276 and the previous Eyre court. In recording the number of homicides, Given sets H = 145, so that H/P = 15 per 100,000, but this figure is correct only if the time elapsed since the previous Eyre court is understood to be twenty-four years and not thirty-two years. If the latter, then H/P = 11 per 100,000, a difference of almost one-third.

In fact, an Eyre court was held in London in 1251. Given thus counted homicides between 1276 and 1244, but estimated homicides between 1251 and 1276. Is the difference statistically significant? We have no idea.

Records for the Eyre court of 1251 have disappeared.

The thesis that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century homicide rates were 30 times higher than contemporary rates owes much to the correlative conviction that men and women of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were emotionally labile, quick to anger, childish, and for this reason, since they were adults with weapons, prone to violence.^[26]Warren Brown is an example. “I too am drawn to medieval violence,” Brown remarks sheepishly at the beginning of his book, Violence in Medieval Europe. No kidding. Warren Brown, Violence in … Continue reading

Medieval court records and chronicles exert a lurid fascination on otherwise sober historians. Criminologists are worse. They cannot leave the stuff alone: “Symonet Spinelli, Agnes his mistress and Geoffrey Bereman were together in Geoffrey’s house when a quarrel broke out among them; Symonet left the house and returned later the same day with Richard Russel his servant to the house of Godfrey le Gorger, where he found Geoffrey; a quarrel arose and Richard and Symonet killed Geoffrey.”^[27]Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” 83.

That was bad luck, Geoffrey.

The story, Eisner goes on to say, “is typical of the situational structure of lethal violence in thirteenth century London—a disagreement, a quarrel leading to a fight, and a fight resulting in a death.”^[28]Eisner, “Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime,” 84.

If the story is typical of the situational structure of lethal violence in thirteenth-century London, it is also typical of the situational structure of lethal violence in the contemporary United States.

At random:

• A south Florida man charged with murdering his girlfriend admitted to disemboweling her with his bare hands after she twice cried out her ex-husband’s name during sex. (Justifiable homicide, I am sure.)
• A Christian rapper fatally struck a Washington, DC, area man in his car after an argument about a music deal.
• According to a Laramie Police Department affidavit, a fight took place at a party on the 700 block of North Seventh Street where Williams admitted to punching Joe McGowan once. Friends of Joe McGowan took him to Ivinson Memorial Hospital with severe head trauma after they found him lying in the gutter unconscious. Joe McGowan was taken to Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, Colorado, where he died from his injuries around 2 p.m. Nov. 1.

These crimes are typical of the crime of manslaughter, circumstances that would be evident to criminologists and historians alike were they to spend more time by the lamp reading the Daily Mail, the Daily News, or the National Enquirer.

Or The Evening Whirl, which is little known at Harvard or at Oxford, but very well known in St. Louis. “We are among the most savage and brutal people on the face of the earth,” the newspaper’s editor Anthony Sanders observed, apparently with professional satisfaction. “We are killing people indiscriminately. It doesn’t always have to be gang or drug related. There are people just going off and killing people. That happens all over the country.”^[29]Quoted in The Guardian of March 31, 2015. Criminologists understand that homicide rates in the United States have always been higher than European homicide rates. The United States, so the argument … Continue reading

Interviews with the author:

• CRITICAL THEORY AND THE SLINGSHOT
• THE NARCISSISTIC MARK

Running a hand the size and shape of a butcher’s block through his iron-gray hair, a grizzled old homicide detective in Akron, Ohio reflects on a persistent methodological mistake in the analysis of homicide statistics.

“Nothing,” he says heavily, “declines from anything.”

“I don’t know, Chief,” his assistant remarks, “Minneapolis homicides are way down.”

“Down from what?”

“Down from here.”

“You’re a dull boy, Stevie,” the grizzled old detective remarks. And he has a point. A difference in homicides is no very good evidence of a decline in homicides. Or the reverse, of course. The population of Akron, Ohio is 200,000: H/P = 11.6. The population of Minneapolis, Minnesota is 400,000: H/P = 2.5. Homicide rates in Minneapolis have not plummeted from their Akron level. Nor have they declined, dropped off, trended downward, or been diminished.

“You tell me,” the grizzled old detective remarks, “you figure homicides are way down there on a cause of what here?”

“The way I figure it, Chief, I figure the lowlifes are getting hold of themselves, working for Google and all.”

“Sort of like lowlife self-control. What do you see, makes you figure the lowlifes are getting control of themselves?”

“Well, the homicides up there are way down, Chief.”

All that one can say is that homicide rates in Akron and Minneapolis are different. But so are homicide rates between thirteenth- and twentieth-century Oxford.^[30]Just when is it proper to speak of a decline in homicide rates? At the very least, when one has a homogeneous population either in space or in time. Thus New York underwent a remarkable decline in … Continue reading

That is the end of it.

“I’m too old for this job,” the grizzled old detective remarks. “Been at it too long.”

Poorly defined problems very often lead to absurd solutions, the ensuing circle having, in the case of homicide rates, the virtue, at least, of long-term stability. Imagining an 800-year decline in homicide rates, criminologists looked naturally for an 800-year explanation.^[31]“In his major work, The Civilizing Process (1978), Elias assumed that an interplay between the expansion of the state’s monopoly of power and increasing economic interdependence would lead to the … Continue reading They were pleased to discover the work of Norbert Elias.^[32]Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Un- tersuchungen (Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken, 1939). An abridged English translation is available as The … Continue reading Published in 1938, his masterpiece, The Civilizing Process, has enjoyed a late-in-life success among criminologists and even a few historians. Steven Pinker has welcomed his views for the narrative comfort that they provide.^[33]Pinker refers to Elias as “the most important thinker you have never heard of.” Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, 59. Pinker, yes; you, maybe; everyone else, no. Elias was a fine German stylist and a man of exuberant imagination. Although expressed at great length, his theories admit of severe compression. Men acquire their differences from their societies: Human nature is second nature. Elias regarded primitive life with fastidious distaste.

In Europe, Elias argued, the civilizing process began in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and it began in various European courts. Having been accustomed to take by force what they could not otherwise obtain by guile, warriors at court were obliged to wheedle, charm, and flatter, and since there were many of them, the imperatives of court life demanded that each develop the self-control needed to participate in a system designed to punish men unable, or unwilling, to control their impulses.^[34]. In a remark now famous, Elias remarked that the Court served to “transform warriors into courtiers.” Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 216. This … Continue reading Court manners spread from the aristocracy to the middle class. Immersed in an ever-expanding network of commercial and professional relationships, merchants and traders had reason to subordinate their impulses to the demands of Geschäft, their well-being contingent on a finely developed sense of mutual obligations, and as they became honest enough to honor commercial contracts, self-interest was promoted from a commercial to a moral virtue. In time, the civilizing process spread downward to peasants and artisans, who, if never before eager for improvement, now adopted with some reluctance, or resentment, the imperatives of civilization.^[35]Keith Thomas remarks shrewdly enough that if Elias sought “to find a theory that ex- plains the spread of civility, we need look no further … than Montesquieu, who wrote … that ‘the … Continue reading The ensuing refinement encompassed table manners, comportment, gesture, dress, standards of elegance, child rearing, sexual relations, and personal hygiene.

This is vividly imagined, and, since it assigns to society as a whole the same system of constraints that every parent imposes on a child, it is easily imagined. It is incorrect in every particular. Elias drew on fifteenth-century instructional manuals for his impression of late-medieval civility, and he was moved and influenced by Johan Huizinga’s study of Burgundian court life.^[36]Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages [1924] (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2013). 66. See David Knowles, Christian Monasticism (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1969). These are limited sources. The improvements to which Elias attended may be found four hundred years earlier in various Benedictine monasteries.^[37]These were precisely the features that Saint Bernard found vexing. See Saint Bernard’s Apologia to William of Thierry for an indignant account of the sumptuousness and artistic grandeur of Cluniac … Continue reading Cluny was notable for its elegance, the refinement of its table, its manners, and its courtliness.^[38]Elias’s grasp of medieval history was insecure and out-of-date when he wrote his book in the early 1930s. Charles Homer Haskins’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard … Continue reading They may be found, those improvements, in the behavior of canon and civil lawyers, university teachers, monastic scribes, medieval physicians, poets, musicians, and singers. The hard shrewd administrators who built the Norman empire in the eleventh century were not careless primitives, slapping together tax rolls, nor was the Vatican under Innocent III an organization manned by men likely to yield to impulse. The architects who constructed the cathedrals at Notre Dame or Chartres planned their work for years, executed them over decades, and built for eternity.^[39]The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century put an end to the Church’s ambition to seize both the temporal and the sacerdotal sword. See Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society … Continue reading

The high Middle Ages marked the emergence of a noble and self-confident civilization. From the battle of Bouvines in 1214 until almost the end of the thirteenth century, Europe was largely at peace. If in the Catholic Church, Europe lacked a ruling power, it had in Catholic doctrine a unifying ideology.^[40]Norbert Elias, Studien über die Deutschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). A warming trend promoted abundant harvests. Populations everywhere increased. On the Continent, there was a revival of Roman law; in England, the emergence of common law. Art, philosophy, literature, music, jurisprudence, and, above all, architecture, flourished and became great; and if medieval kingship was frequently exercised with hesitation, the men of the thirteenth century had every reason to suppose that they were better governed than they had been governed. Having acquired some measure of felicity, the medievals were in no need of a civilizing process to obtain what they already had.

Norbert Elias published The Civilizing Process in German, a gesture of optimism that in retrospect has acquired a tragic grandeur. Elias quite understood that in the twentieth century, the civilizing process had somehow gone into reverse. He could see what was in front of his eyes. Across the Swiss border, civilization was grinding to a halt. His theories and the facts of life were in conflict. He was unwilling to give up his theories and unable to disguise the facts. In 1989, Elias published a volume entitled Studien über die Deutschen.^[41]Norbert Elias, Studien über die Deutschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989). The Germans, he argued, who had since Roman times been universally viewed with some anxiety, were in virtue of their peculiar history exceptions to the civilizing process. This may well be so. No one has ever doubted that the Germans have always been peculiar, and certainly not the Germans. But of what use is the civilizing process as a theory if it fails somehow to include the largest, most powerful, and most populous of European states?

When Norbert Elias published The Civilizing Process, he dedicated the volume to the memory of his parents. His father died in 1941; his mother’s date of death, Elias did not know. She perished at Auschwitz.

In Part Three, the final part, I discuss the more general issue of violence in the twentieth-century and whether there is a statistic by which it can rationally be measured.

David Berlinski is Claire Berlinski’s father. This is a revised version of an essay originally published in the volume Human Nature.