Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960–1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence. This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence. Most criminologists agree that rates of violent crime such as robbery, assault, and homicide started to increase across the Western world sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s and continued to do so for the next three decades until the early 1990s (e.g. Gurr 1981; LaFree 2005; Thome and Birkel 2007). Yet the reasons for this have remained a mystery. Not that there is a lack of criminological explanations. Rather, there are too many and those that we have often contradict each other. The menu includes a rise in delinquent opportunities due to increasing wealth and time spent away from the family (Felson 1987); greater strain resulting from youth unemployment and lack of opportunities (Greenberg 1977); too much welfare state and the rise of an underclass (Mur-ray 1994); too little welfare state and social exclusion (Young 1999): institutional anomie resulting from the conflict between the ethos of material success and growing inequality (Messner and Rosenfeld 1994); excessive individualism due to a loss of communitarian values (Fukuyama 1999); and a loss of legitimacy of economic, social, and family institutions (LaFree 1998). A thorough discussion of these theories and the empirical evidence they rely …