Reflections about violence in modern life

Abstract

The crisis in the progressist representation of History, in which the violence has got a positive meaning as regarded as expression of social classes dispute, gave place, nowadays, to a negative concept of violence, which is now regarded as a failure, and is understood as an appeal to the physical and material world, of a society which has got only mediate information. Therefore, the violence is considered a kind of irruption of the primitive. In this way, it is necessary to mistrust a general definition of violence and take into account that there are contrasting situations of exposure to violence into the modern societies, and that because of this, it is necessary to analyse the social and institutional mechanisms which support this idea.