The Violent Underpinnings of American Life - by Liam Downey (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The Violent Underpinnings of American Life explains how sexual violence against women and police and political violence against Black people maintains social order and elite power in the United States"--

Book Synopsis

A damning examination of how violence serves to maintain social order and elite power in the United States

The Violent Underpinnings of American Life boldly asserts that violence--far from going against American ideals--is as American as apple pie, central to the country's social order and the dominance of its most powerful groups. Drawing from extensive research and analysis of key social, political, and cultural events, Liam Downey investigates the myriad ways violence maintains the American way of life. Through compelling case studies, Downey identifies four main ways in which violence produces and maintains the American social hierarchy: the creation of divisions among non-elite social groups; the reinforcement of dominant discourses in multiple social arenas; the aligning of marginalized group identities with dominant institutional practices; and the selective promotion of the interests of specific, non-elite groups.

This is the first book to argue that violence is both a negative, coercive power and a positive, productive one that helps produce not only social order but also consent, discipline, discourse, identity, subjectivity, and embodied knowledge, among other things. The Violent Underpinnings of American Life is an audacious work that argues violence is absolutely central to social life in America, and that Americans cannot effectively fight against the inequalities that surround them without accepting this reality.

Review Quotes

"Downey thoroughly unpacks the role of violence in creating, maintaining, and enforcing social order in the US."-- "CHOICE"

"Downey explores the central role that violence has played in creating and maintaining the US social order, both domestically and abroad. He highlights how the nation's global position and wealth are intimately linked to forms of violence that create alienation, gender and racial oppression, and inequality. This violence has become embedded within everyday lives, including discourse and corporeal practices. Importantly, with great urgency and insight, Downey demonstrates how it is absolutely necessary to forge a new foundation for human society to thrive."-- "Brett Clark, co-author of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift"

"Downey has written a sobering, hard-hitting, well-researched examination of the role that violence plays in shaping, and indeed making possible, the American social order. Exploring the scourges of sexual and racial violence, Downey's approach is rigorous, data-driven and evidence-based, relentless, and highly persuasive. At this moment when the American cultural landscape is marked by a struggle over our willingness to reckon with the legacies of historical injustices, this book could not be timelier. This is an urgent meditation on who we are and an invitation to think critically and compassionately about what kind of a society we might become."-- "David Naguib Pellow, author of What is Critical Environmental Justice?"

"Liam Downey is the first sociologist since W. E. B. Du Bois to put violence right at the center of American history and social order--a mammoth effort to rework modern social theory around a more accurate account of violence in American life and history."-- "Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America"

About the Author

Liam Downey is Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate for Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Inequality, Democracy and the Environment, Winner of the 2016 American Sociological Association's Section on Environment and Technology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award.