Political crimes in the transition to modernity: Anthropological perspectives

This article is intended as a reflection piece on the question: what could be an anthropological contribution to the question of political crimes? The reflection will consist of three interrelated parts. In the first part, I wish to address the meaning of the words we use when bespeaking “crime” and the “political”. In the second part, I will discuss how the social sciences emerged in the late 19th century as a reflection on the nature of crime in the transition to modernity. The importance of some almost forgotten “classical traditions” will be stressed. In the third part I will briefly indicate how the most celebrated political revolutions within the European tradition, including the French and the Russian Revolutions, are critically tied to the emergence of new forms of political crime originating in crowd behavior. The framework elaborated throughout the article relies on contributions of classical anthropologists and sociologists, who, although known figures, have so far remained peripheral within political anthropology: Ferdinand Tönnies, Gabriel Tarde, Marcel Mauss, Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner and René Girard.