The Six-Shooter State
Public and Private Violence in American Politics

Public and private forms of violence have co-evolved rather than competed in America's political development since the nineteenth century.

Jonathan Obert (Author)

9781108454148, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 October 2018

284 pages, 18 b/w illus. 19 tables
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.7 cm, 0.42 kg

'The research is impressive, and the historical information included in the volume is extensive.' J. P. Dunn, Choice

American violence is schizophrenic. On the one hand, many Americans support the creation of a powerful bureaucracy of coercion made up of police and military forces in order to provide public security. At the same time, many of those citizens also demand the private right to protect their own families, home, and property. This book diagnoses this schizophrenia as a product of a distinctive institutional history, in which private forms of violence - vigilantes, private detectives, mercenary gunfighters - emerged in concert with the creation of new public and state forms of violence such as police departments or the National Guard. This dual public and private face of American violence resulted from the upending of a tradition of republican governance, in which public security had been indistinguishable from private effort, by the nineteenth-century social transformations of the Civil War and the Market Revolution.

1. Introduction
2. Jurisdictional decoupling as institutional change
3. Bandits, elites, and vigilantes in antebellum Illinois
4. Pinkertons and police in antebellum Chicago
5. Racist vigilantism as reform in reconstruction Louisiana
6. The violent careers of American gunfighters
7. Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Central government [JPQ], Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], History of the Americas [HBJK], History [HB]