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AHR Forum
The Problem of American Homicide
| A high murder rate is the dark side of American "exceptionalism," and historians, sociologists, and journalists are among those who have long pondered its causes. Why is it that people kill each other at a greater rate in the United States than in virtually any other nation, and certainly more than in any other advanced industrial society? An American historian who made this question his life's work was Eric Monkkonen, who died in June 2005. The final article in his long publishing career, which he was still working on at his death, forms the centerpiece of this forum on "The Problem of American Homicide." We are proud to be able to offer this summa of his views, a distillation of years of reflection and research, but we are saddened that we will no longer be hearing from a scholar whose thoughtfulness and commitment are apparent in this posthumous essay. His article is commented upon by two historians from very different perspectives. Elizabeth Dale, a legal historian, examines one of Monkkonen's claims, that American courts historically tended to deal leniently with homicide. She analyzes several cases from South Carolina in the early part of the nineteenth century to suggest explanations for this tendency. A historian of Europe, Pieter Spierenburg, takes issue with Monkkonen's dismissal of Norbert Elias's notion of the "civilizing process" as a factor in explaining differential homicide rates. For him, the key difference lies in America's robust and early democratic tradition, which represented an obstacle to the state's capacity to establish a monopoly on force and weaponry that European rulers managed to impose long before democracy took hold. Indeed, one implication of Spierenburg's own analysis is that it may be European, rather than American, exceptionalism that needs explaining. |
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