Bessel’s Violence: A Modern Obsession is a comprehensive work about Western attitudes toward violence during the twentieth century. His book can be considered a meta-study of the humanities and the sciences in its description of how, for the last thirty years, scientific enquiry has become increasingly interested in studying violent behavior. Indeed, ever more books on this topic populate the shelf space of scientific libraries, alongside new journals and research institutes devoted to the subject. This awareness is also observable in politics and the media. Yet, all of this activity is taking place at a time when those theorizing about violence “live lives remarkably free of the phenomenon about which they write” (18). Violence, Bessel argues, has become an “obsession” in the West, and attitudes toward it have changed significantly during the course of the last 150 years.
In his exploration of perceptions and attitudes, Bessel takes care not to...