Samenvatting

This essay charts the changing status of the death penalty in western societies, from a cultural universal three hundred years ago to a prohibited penalty today, and offers a sociological explanation for that great transformation. The ability to impose the penalty of death is an elementary particle of state power. That power was frequently and spectacularly deployed in early modern Europe as states asserted a monopoly on legitimate violence and absolutist rulers deployed force to subdue their enemies. Once states consolidated their infrastructural power, the ostentatious killing of subjects became less necessary. As liberal politics limited the legitimate use of state violence and established legal protections for individuals, and as cultural change softened state power, the death penalty became increasingly problematic. The character of state power, and the balance between liberalism and democracy, civilized refinement and humanitarian sensibility, explains the pace and extent of death penalty change in specific western nations.