ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on some of the questions about social violence which have seemed important to sociologists and some of the ways in which sociological answers to these questions differ from those of other interested students. It includes two sets of theoretical perspectives, which includes the interpretations of violence made by psychoanalysts, by psychologists and by social psychologists and — the second of which is dominated by sociological interpretations. The book differentiates social violence as a social process which occurs predictably and understandably from the social structural arrangements of the societies in which it appears; contrasting this view to one that sees it as the sum of a collection of instances of individual behavior. It provides evidence that there are, in addition to polemic positions, scientific attempts to isolate regularities in racial violence and to identify pattern.
