Making Violence Intelligible: Condemnation, Excuse, and Social Theory

Abstract

When social theory seeks to explain violence, it often faces a recurrent suspicion: that understanding its causes, contexts, or meanings amounts to excusing it. This article takes that suspicion seriously, but subjects it to conceptual reconstruction. Its aim is not to decide when violence may be morally permissible, but to clarify what happens when explanation, understanding, condemnation, justification, legitimation, and excuse become conflated in public debate. Through a series of distinctions, the argument shows that making violence intelligible does not mean making it acceptable. Yet the conflation is not accidental: it becomes persuasive when moral condemnation seeks to preserve itself as absolute rejection and perceives any contextualization as a threat. The most decisive case is excuse, because explanations can provide materials relevant to assessing responsibility without themselves amounting to exoneration. The article thus defends a critical intelligibility of violence: thinking the intolerable without neutralizing its condemnation.