ABSTRACT
One of the striking features of the first volume of Jean-Paul Sartre's monumental Critique of Dialectical Reason is how the question of the intelligibility of history forces to the fore the question of the intelligibility of violence. The concept of structural violence has its roots in the liberation theology of the late 1960s, and has been developed more recently by, among others, the medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, most notably in his work on poverty in Haiti. The analytic force of the concept of structural violence draws, in part, from a shift of focus away from the realm of individual action proper to the social, political, and economic 'structures' that organize the context of relations within which all individual or collective action is set. Likewise, structural and symbolic violence really only seem to de-emphasize the subject, due to the fact that both downplay the role of perpetrating agents of violence.
