Understanding torture: the strengths and the limits of social theory

Abstract

This article explores the contribution that social theory can make to an understanding of the practice of torture. After a contextual introduction it addresses the idealist–realist divide, and the use made of Durkheim and Weber to respectively support two irreconcilable positions, thus displaying the limits of theory. The article then argues that social theory may be better suited to a more modest aim of analysing the social relations, social structures and discursive manoeuvres that underpin the practice of torture, while also considering the role of agency, constraint and individual responsibility. In this light the article revisits the use made of Durkheim and Weber in the opening debate and reconsiders the nature of their continuing relevance.

Keywords:

• human rights
• social theory
• torture
• agency
• ethics

Notes

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991).

Ibid., 8.

Ariel Dorfman, ‘The Tyranny of Terror’, in Torture, ed. Stanford Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.

Henry Shue, ‘Torture’, in Levinson, Torture, 47–60.

But note the persistence of display by some fundamentalist groups through broadcast beheadings of hostages.

Emile Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W.S.F. Pickering (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 59–73; Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 309–69.

My italics.

See Amy Gutman, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), vii–xxviii.

Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’.

Throughout this article, where sex specific language has been used for consistency with an original text I have italicised the usage.

Ibid., 62.

Steven Lukes, ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’, British Journal of Political Science 36 (2005): 14.

Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, 67.

Lukes, ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’, 15.

Bryan Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania. PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2006).

Cf. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 177.

For example, Ignatieff, Human Rights.

Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, 9.

Ibid., 27.

Slavoy Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 103.

Marina Lazreg, ‘Torture, War and Sociology’, ASA Footnotes 36, no. 7 (2008).

Lukes, ‘Liberal democratic torture’.

Ibid., 359.

Ibid., 365.

Alan Dershowitz, ‘Tortured reasoning’, in Levinson, Torture, 257.

Alan Dershowitz, ‘Should we Fight Terror with Torture?’, Independent, 3 July 2006.

Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

Ibid., 18. My italics.

Michael Walzer, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’, in Levinson, Torture, 61–76.

Ibid., 71.

Lukes, ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’, 15.

See Marina Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28.

Stephen E. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 7.

Ibid., 14.

Ibid., 17.

Craig Whitney, ‘Introduction’, in The Abu Ghraib Investigations, ed. Steven Strasser (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), xx.

Strasser, The Abu Ghraib Investigations, 109.

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 45.

For commentary, see Eamonn Carrabine, ‘Images of Torture: Culture, Politics and Power’, Crime, Media, Culture 7 (2011): 5–30.

Erving Goffman, Asylums (London: Penguin, 1991).

Ibid., 22.

Ibid., 24.

Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits (New York: Schocken Books, 1990).

Goffman, Asylums, 32.

Ibid., 35.

Amery, Mind's Limits; Judith Butler, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’, British Journal of Sociology 59 (2008): 1–23; Lazreg, Twilight of Empire.

Goffman, Asylums, 35.

Ibid., 36.

Amery, Mind's Limits, 35.

Eisenman, Abu Ghraib Effect, 35.

Goffman, Asylums, 48.

Lazreg, Twilight of Empire, 216.

Scarry, Body in Pain, 18.

Ibid., 36.

Primo Levi, If this is a Man (London: Orion Press, 1969).

Amery, Mind's Limits.

Scarry, Body in Pain.

Lazreg, Twilight of Empire; Scarry, Body in Pain.

Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 178.

Lazreg, Twilight of Empire.

Robert Cover, ‘Violence and the Word’, Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601.

Lazreg, Twilight of Empire, 62.

Ibid., 73.

Ibid., 178.

Ibid., 202.

Stan Cohen, ‘Neither Honesty nor Hypocrisy’, in The Politics of Crime Control, eds Tim Newburn and Paul Rock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 297–318.

Strasser, Abu Ghraib Investigations, 21.

David Bowker, ‘Unwise Counsel’, in The Torture Debate in America, ed. Karen Greenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 183.

Strasser, Abu Ghraib Investigations, 3.

Danner, Torture and Truth, 84.

Lukes, ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’.

Cohen, ‘Neither Honesty nor Hypocrisy’, 308. Cf. Danner, Torture and Truth.

Lee Casey and David Rivkin, ‘Rethinking the Geneva Convention’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 209.

Reproduced in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 317–57.

Reproduced in Danner, Torture and Truth, 88–91.

Andrew McCarthy, ‘Torture: Thinking the Unthinkable’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 105.

Reproduced in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 317–57.

Bybee memo, reproduced in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 321.

Ibid., 330.

Strasser, Abu Ghraib Investigations, 31.

Whitney, ‘Introduction’, xx.

Cohen, ‘Neither Honesty nor Hypocrisy’; Noah Feldman, ‘Ugly Americans’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 267–79.

Bowker, ‘Unwise counsel’, 200.

David Luban, ‘Liberalism, Torture and the Ticking Bomb’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 55.

Despite the wrecked lives of some victims. See John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People (New York: Random House, 2001).

See ‘A National Disease’, Guardian, 11 February 2010, 31; ‘Britain's Omerta on Torture is a Crime’, Independent on Sunday, 22 February 2009, 39.

Cohen, ‘Neither Honesty nor Hypocrisy’; Richard Bilder and Detlev Vagts, ‘Speaking Law to Power’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 151–61.

Michael Ratner and Peter Weiss, ‘Litigating against Torture’, in Greenberg, Torture Debate, 261–6. This did not succeed, but is an interesting example of creative legal thinking and indicative of a degree of unfixity in the law.

Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart, 2000).

Kate Nash, ‘The Pinochet Case’, British Journal of Sociology 58 (2007), 418–35.

For example, Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003).

Craig Barker, ‘The Case against Pinochet’, American Diplomacy IV, no. 3 (1999).

Jane Wright, ‘Retribution but no Recompense’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 30 (2010): 143. At the time of writing Abdel Hakim Belhaj had started legal proceedings against Jack Straw for his role in the rendition of Belhaj, the first action of this kind against a former Foreign Secretary. ‘Straw faces Legal Action for Alleged Complicity in Torture of Libyan’, Guardian, 19 April 2012, 7.

See Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, 97.

Ibid., 139.

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003); Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin, 2006).

Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, 19.

Robert Fine and David Hirsh, ‘The Decision to Commit a Crime against Humanity’, in Rational Choice Theory: A Critique, eds Margaret Archer and Jonathan Tritter (London: Routledge, 2000), 183–99.

Ibid., 187. Here they cite Weber, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 220.

Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 125.

For example, Walzer, ‘Political Action’, 71.

Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, 355.

Ibid., 367. Italics in the original.

Ibid., 369.

Cf. Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’.

Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, 364. My italics.

Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’, 64.

Cf. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights.

As implied by Lukes, ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’, 15.

Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 151. My italics.