Jonathan Obert

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

Public and Private Violence in American Politics

The Six-Shooter State

Public and private forms of violence have co-evolved rather than competed in America's political development since the nineteenth century.

Austin Sarat

Andrew Poe

Guns are ever-present figures in the American public conversation. Rather than rehash the same debates over the right to bear arms or who is at fault in mass shootings, The Lives of Guns shifts the focus from the people wield or defend them to the guns themselves. Taking the agency and power of guns as a radical jumping-off point, this book explores guns as political actors in American culture, ultimately offering something new and different to a complex and emotion-laden debate.

Jonathan Obert

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