ABSTRACT
A key development, which has been paid attention in historical sociology than in histories of political thought, lies in shifting norms about the use of violence in domestic politics. Resistance ceased to be contentious not because the world awakened to the correct view but because the issues in question themselves changed. Only in the context of a pacified society does the principle of governmental accountability lose its fearsome aspect and become an unremarkable, uncontentious feature of normal politics. Working out the idea of a pacified society was a principal problem of seventeenth-century social contract theory. While significant for the idea that some limitation on the use of force is a defining feature of civil society, this Grotian formula left vague the extent of the necessary ban on political resistance. The realism of John Locke's and Thomas Hobbes's political imagination bears remark fully as much as does their conceptual achievement in working out the idea of a pacified, civil society.
