The former version of chapter 5, “Punishment and the Sacred: How Do Great Religions Punish?” appeared in the journal Hrvatski ljetopis za kazneno pravo i praksu (Croatian Annals of Penal Law and Practice), vol. 19, no. 1 (2012), pp. 209–253, under the title “Kako kažnjavaju velike religije? Prilog čitanju kaznene politike svetih...

This book brings together different accounts of violence and punishment. By doing so, it deals with two things: discourses and ontologies. The former means that it discusses various representations of violence and punishment, and the latter that it is interested in how these discourses—the semantic modes of political interpretation of the world—depict and understand structures and...

In his 1921 essay, mystical in tone and eschatological in content, Walter Benjamin offered a critique of the death penalty. Its obscure language, difficult to translate, had an inebriating effect. Incessantly read and interpreted, Critique of Violence gained the status of a sacred text of critical theory. On the subject of death penalty, it said:

There is a Whig history of everything, including punishment.Throughout the book and especially this chapter I use the terms Whig and Whiggish in the sense of optimistic belief in linear progress in history, associated with British proto-liberalism but applicable to other ideological children...

The late Carlos Fuentes is one of the big Latin American writers who ultimately did not receive a Nobel Prize. His 2006 collection of sixteen stories was brought together under the title Happy Families (Todas las familias felices). The book, properly loaded with Shakespearean references, was largely about violence in Mexico, often through the prism of family histories....

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, a nineteenth-century British lord, famously claimed that power corrupts. The more you have it, the higher the chances that you are or will be corrupted. Absolute power is, logically, not good. Acton’s equation was, however, formulated as a tendency. Perhaps a mere litotes, an irony of...

“[T]he path from one or another Bible verse to state policy today is very complicated.” Thus claims Francis Xavier Clooney, a Jesuit and a Harvard-based professor of divinity and comparative theology, in an interview about Christianity and capital punishment. He continues by commenting the use of scripture in legitimating punishment. There is a “risk of ‘proof...

One of the ways to define literature is to say that it is a genre of writing that is not instrumental. Its purpose, if that word can be used at all, is aesthetic at best. It is found in the realm of uninterested appeal, of sublime pleasing of the senses. In a short history of English literature that he initially wrote as a colonial civil servant, the author of Clockwork Orange, an...

A specter of politics is haunting criminology. But, in contrast to the better-known version of the dictum, there is no holy alliance to exorcise this specter, although one could say that the pope and tsar, French radicals and German police spies, are still playing the same game of politics. It means that criminological theories appear in various political roles and bring conflicting policy...

Are extremes bad?

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Krešimir Petković is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb. He teaches courses in political theory and public policy. He is the author (in Croatian) of State and Crime: Politics and Violence in Croatia 1990–2012 (Zagreb: Disput, 2013), and is a member of MENSA Croatia and the Croatian Political Science Association.