Rehabilitating Leviathan: Reflections on the State, Economic Regulation and Violence Reduction

This article argues that some currently influential liberal-culturalist discourses tend to underplay the direct link between violent street crime, economic marginalization and the more ruthless adaptive aspects of advanced capitalist culture. In doing so they consistently reify the state, misconstrue its social role and represent its decline as a fait accompli. There is also a tendency to misrepresent the relative and moderate success in reducing street violence that it once achieved by using its political mandate to help maintain underlying economic stability above the required threshold. Underneath these discourses is a tacit political endorsement of the global neo-liberal project that is revealed by their collusion in the political neutralization of populations and the delegitimization of the potentially democratic state and its vital role in socio-economic stabilization and violence reduction.