ABSTRACT
T his book has explicated the texts left by half a dozen killers o f our time. It has not focused on these murderers because their thoughts or acts are o f any merit, but because it is only through a detailed examination o f their careers that we can hope to understand the origin and meaning o f their activities. We have taken as our starting point the observation o f Robert Darnton that it is precisely ‘when we run into something that seems unthink able to us [that] we may have hit upon a valid point o f entry into an alien m entality’. Having done this, we will now try to m arry the great historical and anthropological enterprises. In doing so, we will ‘have puzzled through to the native’s point o f view’ and mounted an explanation o f the inexplicable. So far we have tried to reveal the immediate motives behind the killers’ acts: now our task is to transcend the immediate, to suggest that these motives are neither insane nor random but buried deeply in the
social order, part o f a continuously evolving social process.1
