ABSTRACT
Social conflict presents a topic where the wish to bring bodies into sociological analysis should meet no resistance. Although conflict theory can be dryly abstract, its close connections to the realities of physical combat, by metaphor when not literally, makes it easy to link representations of social conflict with the interaction of physical bodies. As a form of social interaction, conflict has properties that can be investigated without reference to the orientations of individual actors. When social science does appropriate knowledge about bodies into its discourse on conflict it often relies on assumptions about an inherent human disposition toward aggression. In Thomas Hobbes analysis of the dynamics of social conflict, Boulding points to a second variable that figures in the equation regarding escalation of conflict. Sociologists have analyzed a variety of mechanisms of social control that work to mute or dampen conflictual processes. The foregoing investigation opens up new lines for work in the general theory of conflict.
