ABSTRACT
To what extent is violence learnt, socialised, embodied? How do our social and cultural contexts shape our relationships with violence? These are questions that structure the field of men's violence across feminisms, masculinity studies, criminology, and psychoanalysis. This chapter takes a key debate from the literature on men's violence that ensued between British psychosocial researchers in response to the realist work of Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt. As a sociologist and educator who was involved in developing violence prevention and ‘being better men’ programmes for schools and health services these questions were central to effective primary prevention. This chapter draws upon critical realism under labouring these questions in social theory. The chapter argues the psychosocial critique is imprecise and that it fails to recognise the realist disposition of Connells work which in its own way does attend in detail to the foundational questions of structure and agency, the epistemic fallacy, and voluntarism and determinism. This is supported by aligning Connell's work with Adornos logic of identity and Archer's modes of communicate reflexivity.
