Redressing Grievances: The Retaliation Model
To what extent has practice conformed to the principles outlined in Chapters 1 and 2? This chapter and the following one establish that history corresponds roughly with theory. They do so by contrasting two models of grievance-redress: a retaliation model
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In turning from theory to practice, it’s essential to begin with the most basic of questions concerning social organization: how to resolve grievances about harm. Grievances fester: they originate in resentment and they culminate, at least sometimes, in retaliatory violence. The challenge they pose has to do with the containment of violence—with identifying and adopting procedures that forestall retaliation by persuading p arties their grievances will be fairly resolved. Retaliation can be resolved if grieving parties expect that their assailants will be punished. In this way, punishment—even the prospect of punishment—can serve as a mechanism for averting retaliation. This said, a distinction must be drawn between retaliation and punishment. Retaliation is possible among equals. Punishment, in contrast, presupposes inequality. It doesn’t presuppose social inequality. It does, however, require a difference in authority, one in which someone asserts that he/she may properly criticize someone else and so deprive that person of liberty. On this analysis, the path from retaliation to punishment couldn’t have been a straight one. Lex talionis is a code of revenge. When adhering to it, a member of, say, a tribe can permissibly strike back against © The Author(s) 2019 W. C. Heffernan, Rights and Wrongs, Critical Criminological Perspectives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12782-4_3
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another member of that tribe once the retaliator is able to point to an injury (a lost eye or tooth) suffered at the hands of the other person. Punishment, on the other hand, presupposes a hierarchy of power. It’s properly imposed by someone not affected by another’s conduct— properly imposed, in other words, by a third party (neither a victim nor an offender) who evaluates a grievance without having been directly hurt by it. This distinction as to power paves the way for others that differentiate lex talionis from the practice of punishment—in particular, the distinction between injury and wrongdoing and the distinction between equivalence and proportionality in calculating the proper response to a grievance. The power-hierarchy essential to punishment makes it possible to understand, then, the social evolution that occurred as grievance-redress ceased to be a matter of retaliation and came to be the province of criminal justice, for it was only when state authority came to be embedded in everyday life that the revenge practices characteristic of tit-for-tat retaliation began to be supplanted by the exercise of impersonal procedures for redressing grievances. This transition is one of civilization’s great achievements. Although the exercise of authority by the modern state is open to substantial criticism, it’s also true that the rise of state power during the last millennium has contributed to a dramatic reduction in acts of violence. This chapter and the next chart the transition from retaliation to criminal justice by treating each as a model of grievance-redress. The table below outlines the factors peculi
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