Ethical Violence (eBook)

Carlo Bordoni is Professor of Sociology at the University Mercatorum of Rome and the author of Post-Society and State of Crisis (with Zygmunt Bauman).

Introduction: Living in Disturbing Times

1. Do We Live in the Most Rational of All Possible Worlds?

2. The Violence of Reason

3. Avoidable Conflicts

4. The Ethics of Violence

5. The Fault of Modernity

6. Only Technology Can Save Us

"Carlo Bordoni has written a remarkable book. It should serve as a wakeup call to what is happening in terms of our increasing abandonment of science in favor of technology, which, by the very click-of -the-button nature has disastrously changed the perception of knowledge to mere personal opinions. Because of this imbalance, and its pocketbook nature, we are seeing an irrational drift in the nature of our societies democratic responses, and a revival of the predominance of the emotional which is gaining ground and dangerously altering the very nature of social and political life. Bordoni also warns of the difficulties of putting scattergun beliefs and notional opinions back into any agreed and rational collective order in the years ahead. An informed and challenging book."
Mari Fitzduff, Brandeis University

"Bordoni's search for an understanding of the paradox of ethical violence - and of many other puzzles of human rationality and irrationality - takes him through many times and places of human history, a wealth of philosophers and others from the ancient Greeks to today's writers, and a myriad of ideas. This is a book that makes you stop and think after nearly every sentence."
Colin Crouch, University of Warwick

"Ethical Violence is a timely book, a theoretical vade mecum for dark times, simultaneously ambitious and cautious, taking the reader on unusual paths from ancient philosophers to contemporary social scientists, questioning what is taken for granted about the distinction between rationality and irrationality. A needed reflection on the crisis of late modernity."
Didier Fassin, Collège de France and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton