ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the idea of aggression with the concept of 'emancipatory violence' favoured in the student movement of the late 1960s. In North America and Europe, the decade of political terrorism that followed 1968 saw the high-profile participation of women in sometimes lethal violence, and the historically transmitted association of masculinity with violence and femininity with peaceability came under pressure. The dualism of violence and peace, of aggression and peaceability, seems to be at the heart of human experience and society, whether it is understood as an expression of the 'behavioural potentialities of primates' as anthropologists would have it. In correlating sociological and political perspectives on human aggression, Alexander Mitscherlich was avowedly searching for a psychologically relevant structural model for a peaceful order. An echo chamber of contemporary fears, the meandering essay remained sceptical about the prospect of taming human aggression, and is theoretically inconclusive.
