Bourdieu’s Fifth, Neglected Capital

In the coerced and coercive social space of the Jewish enclosure under German tutelage, the four fundamental species of capital catalogued by Bourdieu accrue and circulate as they would in other contexts.Footnote ² But their accumulation, investment and conversion are inflected, subordinated, amplified, truncated and often even outright suppressed by a fifth form of capital neglected by the French sociologist: material violence. I say “neglected” and not “ignored” because Bourdieu does mention it in his account of the historical formation of the state, where we read:

Nowhere does Bourdieu develop this proposition to analyze material violence specifically in its interpersonal, group and state incarnations, even though it is the silent counterpart to his epicentral notion of “symbolic violence.”Footnote ³ We need only unpack his generic concept of capital, however, to develop the construct of capital of violence or capital of physical coercion as the dominant species of capital in the Jewish enclosures of the Holocaust—and beyond.

In the theoretical elaborations of his lecture course at the Collège de France On the State, Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu2012] concentrates exclusively on “the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence” and leaves material violence undiscussed, except to report on its central place in the conception of the Leviathan of Norbert Elias and Charles Tilly. He also briefly speaks to the “cycles of violence” in pre-capitalist or stateless societies, but even then the focus is on symbolic capital.

Similarly, in his lecture course on “General Sociology,” Bourdieu does not address physical violence other than to note in transitu its place in masculine working-class culture [Reference Bourdieu2015: 321]; the deflation of “physical and direct violence” in history, which he contrasts with the inflation of the “inert violence” of “abstract, anonymous, neutral mechanisms” such as the market, the legal system or the school system [Reference Bourdieu2016: 212-213], which he christens “institutional violence” [Reference Bourdieu2016: 221]; the paradox of the conjoint high incidence and strong euphemization of force in pre-capitalist societies [2016: 220]; the sublimation of physical violence into codes of politesse and civility [Reference Bourdieu2016: 222–223]; and the “pure violence, without finality,” other than affirming an identity, during the virulent affrays between football fans [Reference Bourdieu2016: 767–768].

In Méditations pascaliennes, Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu1997: 275–276] postulates a “law of the conservation of violence” according to which persons subjected to abusive physical force will be prone to wield it themselves. But it is not clear whether that law applies only to the “intentional violence” of brutal individuals or also to the circulus it forms with the “inert violence” of ordinary institutions. Finally, in La Domination masculine [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1998], the French sociologist centers his analysis on his theoretical forte, namely, the symbolic dimension of domination, giving short shrift to its material counterpart in the form of intimate partner surveillance, coercion and abuse flowing from patriarchy, much to the chagrin of his feminist readers [Adkins and Skeggs Reference Adkins and Skeggs2004].Footnote ⁴

One has to go all the way back to Bourdieu’s early fieldwork as an anthropologist in colonial Algeria to find a treatment of military force in the “regroupment camps,” in which over 2 million Algerians were corralled and interned, and which were rolled out by France in its futile effort to stem the independentist tide [Bourdieu and Sayad Reference Bourdieu and Sayad1964]. But this treatment is surprisingly thin and sanitized in light of the veritable orgy of official violence unleashed by the French army and settlers—including systematic torture, summary executions, forced disappearances, collective reprisals and the targeted destruction of villages. Similarly, his dissection of the colonial society and the revolutionary war in his youthful essays such as the “The Clash of Civilizations,” “War and Social Mutation in Algeria” and “From Revolutionary War to Revolution” [reprinted in Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Yacine2008] does foreground force as an agent of cataclysmic transformation and social wreckage, but without thematizing it as such.

Physical violence is an empirical fact and not a theoretical category, which is not surprising since the young Bourdieu had yet to introduce the concepts of capital and symbolic violence, first broached in 1964 and 1970, respectively. The French sociologist is interested in its sublimation, not its operation—no doubt because the latter seemed to him transparent, if not self-evident, whereas symbolic violence is secret, surreptitious and elusive, constantly changing face as it travels across circumstances and institutions. But it is analytically easy to extend Bourdieu’s framework to encompass the capital of coercion as it fits right in with his embrace of “generalized materialism” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1972].

Now, I am on record criticizing scholars who have played the game of the christic “multiplication of capitals” (street, sexual, spatial, racial, etc.), so I make this addition cautiously as a conceptual move needed to explicate the functioning of a universe saturated with violences, the Nazi racial enclosure, which one cannot account for with Bourdieu’s four core species. My purpose differs from the usual “additive” strategy: it is to rework the foundational quartet into a quintet and not simply add another local category by derivation. Ultimately, the concept of capital of violence must prove its worth in the production of new objects and not as a matter of analytical symmetry or rhetorical elegance on paper.

To anticipate: I propose that physical coercion is not just irreducible; it is the foundational form of capital from which other forms of capital, including economic capital, derive. Every social agent detains a minimal capacity to wield it (if only against themselves, as with self-mutilation and suicide):Footnote ⁵ a shove or a slap in the face is to physical violence what the everyday insult is to symbolic violence, its lowest-order manifestation [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2015: 26–29]. But, when it is concentrated, it has the capacity to annihilate the other forms of capital by asserting the primacy of force in the social world when the full chain of causality runs its course.

In differentiated and stratified societies, the state is the agency that most distinctly concentrates manifold instruments of coercion, indeed claims to monopolize their legitimate use. Diverging from the neo-Weberian lineage running through Norbert Elias, Charles Tilly and Bourdieu himself, I wish to stress that this monopoly is vigorously contested and routinely breached by social agents who take violent matters into their own hands—from teenage brawls in schoolyards to inmate clashes in prison yards, from conjugal abuse to strategic criminal use, from urban riots to religious pogroms. Not only do violent actors proliferate in social space in spite of the state’s claim; they also often refuse to grant legitimacy to the official deployment of coercion. This is attested by wide mobilization against “police brutality,” “police abuse” or “police violence”—the label itself is contested—and by the differential inclination of different state elites to allow for or repress the politicization of such routine practices as police stops for identity checks, which commonly lead to street fracas [Maillard, Verfaillie and Rowe Reference Maillard, Verfaillie and Rowe2024].

Material Violence as Foundational Capital

In keeping with the historicist-analytical approach I advocate [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2026], I define violence as the intentional threat or actual use of force against an individual, social category, population or institution to inflict bodily, material or psychic harm. Bodily harm comprises brutality, injury and death; material harm encompasses the denial, confiscation and destruction of property; psychic harm includes damage to mental and emotional integrity.Footnote ⁶ These three elements are often mixed, as with incarceration, a legitimate form of violence delivered by the state, which translates into the deprivation of liberty, autonomy, safety, access to material goods and to heterosexual relations–the five “pains of imprisonment” catalogued by Gresham Sykes in his classic The Society of Captives [Reference Sykes1957]. This leads me to make seven points about material violence or coercion as capital that suggest new pathways to theorize the means and modalities of domination as well as to renew and refine Bourdieu’s analytical framework.

1. Physical force is a capital because, like the other species, it enables its holders to “appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” and to capture streams of material and symbolic profit circulating in the pertinent social space [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2022: 613]. A crude illustration is the violence deployed to compel a slave to work; a second is sexual assault or domestic brutality in its various guises; a third is a column of tanks crashing its way through the defense line of a rival army on the battlefield. In all three of these situations, the agent of force seeks—and often gains—the value sought, labor power, sexual gratification or a military advantage. In the absence of coercion, the action would not take the same course and its outcome would be changed. In these illustrations, violence is a vis activa irreducible to the other four species of capital. Thus the Nazi enclosures of occupied Eastern Europe simply would not have existed if not for the multiform violences inflicted upon Jews by military, police and civilian agents. Jews were ordered to migrate into their officially designed “ghettos” under threat of immediate deportation or death, and the population transfer typically involved intimidation, confiscation, deportation, beatings and killings by the German police [Cole Reference Cole and Stone2004; Trunk (1962) Reference Trunk2006; Crago Reference Crago, Megargee and Dean2012].

2. Like cultural capital, the capital of violence exists in three forms:Footnote ⁷ embodied, as the capacity of an individual, solo or in a group, to deliver or withstand physical force—crucial to strategies of self-protection, material appropriation and honor on the streets of neighborhoods of relegation in advanced society [Bourgois (1995) Reference Bourgois2003; Anderson Reference Anderson2000; Sauvadet Reference Sauvadet2006; Sandberg Reference Sandberg2008], for instance, but also at work in the clashes between ethnoracial groups as with riots, pogroms and ethnic cleansing [Brubaker and Laitin Reference Brubaker and Laitin1998; Gerlach Reference Gerlach2010; Kopstein and Wittenberg Reference Kopstein and Wittenberg2018]; objectified in the form of equipment and weaponry, offensive (knives, guns, drones, bombs and tanks, etc.), defensive (shields, barbed wire, bunkers, berms, anti-aircraft systems, etc.) and communicative (tattoos, uniforms, insignias, medals, manuals of military strategy), deployed in everyday life or on the battlefield, as illustrated by the militarization of the police across advanced societies [Graham Reference Graham2010]; and institutionalized, in such enduring organizations as gangs, mafias, militias, the police, the prison and the military, which can all deliver diffuse or targeted force and endure the same [Sánchez-Jankowski Reference Sánchez-Jankowski1991; Gambetta Reference Gambetta1993; Weinstein Reference Weinstein2007; Fassin Reference Fassin2011; Bourke Reference Bourke2015]. In this regard, Nazism may be construed as an exceptional accumulation and virulent deployment of the capital of violence in all three of its forms, trained on territorial expansion and racialized population control—hyperviolence in all of its incarnations [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2027a].

3. Like the other species of capital, physical violence is convertible: a violent actor can generate flows of income and seize material goods (economic capital), acquire artifacts of human skills (cultural capital), press his way into resourceful networks and organizations (social capital) and garner prestige, inspire fear and radiate menace (symbolic capital). The Nazis were particularly adept at the conversion of violent capital into the symbolic capital of intimidation: to this day, the mere mention of the name Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), the secret police that led the way in brutally enforcing racial policy in both the Reich and its captured territories, strikes terror into the hearts of people all across Europe [Dams and Stolle (2008) Reference Dams and Stolle2014].

4. The capital of violence enters into the variegated portfolio of capitals possessed by a given individual or group, determining their position in social space and thence their social strategies and trajectories, noting that, like all capital, it has “a tendency to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986: 246]. Better yet, violence multiplies the value and amplifies the scope of the other forms of capital by expanding the perimeter of their activation. For instance, violence was deployed to impose forced labor upon Jews, both to increase the economic productivity of that labor and to dramatize ethnic humiliation [Gruner Reference Gruner2006; Aly Reference Aly2007; Browning Reference Browning2010]. Relatedly, the capital of violence has the capacity to diminish and even obliterate other forms of capital, as when, inside Germany, the Nazis confiscated the property of Jews or excluded them from certain occupations, even though they had the skills and credentials to pursue them, or degraded them publicly to strip them of honor as part of their policy of ethnic persecution [FriedländerReference Friedländer1997].

5. Like social capital, the capital of violence can be concentrated and delegated. Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu2022: 627] writes: “Every group assumes more or less institutionalized forms of delegation that allow the concentration, in the hands of a singular agent or a small group of agents, of the totality of the social capital which founds the existence of the group (family, nation but also association or party).” Mandating a “plenipotentiary” to “represent the group, to act and speak in its name” applies not just to the symbolic register but to the material register: the deployment of the capital of coercion is commonly entrusted with a specialist, lay or professional, the canonical case being the police officer who arrests, searches, books or shoots at a suspect. In World War II, the Nazi managers of the Jewish enclosures of Eastern Europe dispatched the Schutzpo (protection police) to patrol the perimeter of the “ghetto,” the Kripo (criminal police) in response to ordinary crimes against Germans inside the enclosure and the Gestapo (secret police) to detect and repress underground political activity, leaving crimes among Jews to the internal Jewish police and its dedicated courts [Bethke (2015) Reference Bethke2021].

6. Coercive power is peculiar, even paradoxical, in that it is most efficient when it is held in reserve, threatened but not enacted: intimidation as the projection of latent violence is a strategy superior to its direct exercise because it economizes on material resources and social energy.Footnote ⁸ An individual (in a couple, for instance), a group (jockeying for ethnic position) or a state can influence the conduct of its targets by signaling that it is prepared to activate force without having to do so.Footnote ⁹ The Nazi authorities could get the Jewish councils of the enclosures to take charge of selecting, rounding up and delivering a subset of its population for deportation to death camps, thus dramatically lowering the cost of staging transports in terms of personnel, resources and time, by threatening to deport a larger quota or even to annihilate the whole population via the liquidation of the “ghetto” [Corni Reference Corni2003; Horwitz Reference Horwitz2008]. Intimidation played a pivotal and pervasive role in the day-to-day management of the enclosures of the Holocaust by shaping ordinary conduct, thwarting deviation and deterring challenges [Trunk (1962) Reference Trunk2006].Footnote ¹⁰ The threat of worse coercion makes a coercive move more efficient. But the longer the violent agency goes on without acting on its threat to prove its force, the less efficient its intimidation. There is thus a distinctive economy of violent goods stretched out over time, much as there is a distinctive “economy of symbolic goods” with multiple temporalities, according to Bourdieu’s [Reference Bourdieu1993b] dissection of fields of cultural production.

7. Last but not least, inserting the capital of violence into Bourdieu’s theoretical schema revives and reformulates the question of the causal priority and primacy of this or that species of capital. Consistent with his doubly materialist ontology, Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu2022: 629, my italics] proposes that “economic capital is at the basis of all the other forms of capital” and that “these transformed and disguised forms of economic capital [i.e., cultural, social and symbolic] produce their specific effects” only insofar as “they dissimulate (first of all to their holders) the fact that economic capital is at their basis.”Footnote ¹¹ One must ask, then: is the capital of violence, in turn, not at the basis of economic capital, since property rights and market relations are enforced by the law or regulated by conventions which, “in the final analysis” (an expression Bourdieu himself uses), rest on violence (legitimate or not, an issue we shall table for now)?

This is certainly the view of Karl Marx who, in part VIII of Das Kapital, argues that capitalism arises from violent expropriation: the forcible separation of producers from the means of production through enclosure, colonial conquest, slavery and other forms of state-backed dispossession. His most pertinent formulation figures in his discussion of the “primitive accumulation” of capital:

There is no shortage of archeologists and historical anthropologists, from Carneiro [Reference Carneiro1970] to Earle [Reference Earle1997] to Flannery and Marcus [Reference Flannery and Marcus2012], who argue that early economic accumulation at the dawn of civilization was carried out by political operators ruling through warfare and coercion.Footnote ¹³ The accumulation of capital in the cities of early modern Europe was likewise entwined with war-making and state-building [Tilly Reference Tilly1990]. As for contemporary society, the example of eviction suffices to remind us that brute force is central to shaping market relations—here the functioning of the lowest tier of the housing market, an essential good by any definition [Desmond Reference Desmond2016; François Reference François2023].

Applying Bourdieu’s formulation cited above to deepen and extend the theoretical line he traces, I propose that violence as the capital of physical force is “at the basis” of economic capital and that the latter can exercise its specific effects only insofar as “it dissimulates (first of all to their holders) the fact that the capital of violence is at its basis.” In other words, violence is the only truly naked form of capital, whereas economic capital itself, even in its crudest manifestations, is already a transformed, misrecognized form of power.

Violence Accumulated, Delegated and Racialized

In Western history, after the age of absolutism, the bureaucratic state gradually “monopolizes the legitimate use of violence”—to recall Max Weber’s classic definition of the Leviathan.Footnote ¹⁴ It protects the population from the threat of force and abuse by pacifying social space as part of what Norbert Elias [(1939) Reference Elias2000] calls the “civilizing process.” This allows for the extension of social networks, the flourishing of formal organizations and the development of courteous sensibilities based on the taming of affect, the privatization of bodily functions and the internalization of social constraint. Intolerance of violence rises and stamps social structure, experience and personality alike. In differentiated societies, the use of the capital of coercion is normally tightly constrained and regulated: its deployment is channeled by norms, laws and the supervision of the state as the “central bank of violent capital” (borrowing Bourdieu’s evocative characterization of symbolic capital) validating or sanctioning the use of coercion at all scales, from interpersonal relations to group encounters to state action. In a world-historical perspective, Westerners live in societies in which, thanks to the legal-rational state—to invoke Weber again—violence has been drastically deflated, domesticated and sequestered [Muchembled Reference Muchembled2008].Footnote ¹⁵

Not so under Nazi rule, where the state is a direct source of both diffuse and targeted ethnoracial violence of staggering breadth and intensity. Indeed, Elias [(1989) Reference Elias1996] has argued that Nazism may be viewed as the spawn of a “decivilizing spurt” (Entzivilisierungsschub) within the civilizing process, marked by the erosion of restraints on violence, the activation of ethnic ressentiment and the legitimation of brutality and cruelty. The violence of the German Leviathan leading to and during World War II is delivered by its official agents as well as by ordinary people and groups operating by delegation—explicit in the case of the internal Jewish police charged with order maintenance inside the enclosures, tacit in the case of local auxiliaries and civilians, such as the Polish citizens who took it upon themselves to chase, brutalize, capture and kill Jews trying to escape the enclosures [Grabowski Reference Grabowski2013; Gross Reference Gross2022].Footnote ¹⁶ Such informal deputization of a multiplicity of operators violates the principle according to which “physical violence can no longer be applied but by a specialized grouping, especially mandated for this purpose” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1993b: 109]. Another way to put it: inside the “ghettos” of the Holocaust, the capital of violence accumulates on a colossal scale and circulates at an accelerated speed; its activation reaches every last corner of the social structure, floods every crevice of physical space and seeps deep into subjectivity, both Jewish and German.Footnote ¹⁷

Nazi violence in the urban enclosure is at once instrumental, expressive and consumptive. Instrumental: it is deployed as a means to an end, to impose caste subordination, enforce labor exploitation and compel institutional exclusion, the three faces of domination [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2024b: 26–27]. Its most decisive and dramatic day-to-day manifestation is the police patrolling of the enclosure’s perimeter: attempts to come close to or cross the fence are met with lethal force [Bethke (2015) Reference Bethke2021]. Expressive: violence is mobilized to send messages to the Jewish captives and to signify their inferior status and utter rightlessness—they have no prerogatives and their lives are worthless. Indeed, some of this violence, such as the staging of mock executions or forcing Jews to dance, kneel or crawl on the street or to run a gauntlet, not to mention sexual violence (long censored in the memorial and historical literature), has no other purpose but to terrorize and humiliate.Footnote ¹⁸ Nazi violence is also consumptive, that is, delivered for its own sake, in a sort of Nietzschean quest for the frenzied pleasure of punishing and hurting, as with the sadistic episodes of “violence for entertainment” in which some German officers indulged, randomly killing Jews for no particular reason and without concern for consequences.Footnote ¹⁹

Why this orgy of brutality? I have shown elsewhere that, in situations of categorical rivalry in social and physical space, race is an accelerant of violence, especially when the boundary it draws is based on descent, and even more so, strict hypo-descent, which fuels feverish anxiety about blood purity [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2024b: 144–153]. Now, blood purity was an individual and collective obsession in Nazi Germany because the frontier between Aryans and Jews was established genealogically and not culturally. It was legally codified and bureaucratically enforced, making it sharp, bright and rigid. You were defined as a Jew if you had one or more grandparents themselves classified as Jewish, regardless of your present faith and social ties. Blood was the foundation of “thinking and acting like a Nazi” [Chapoutot Reference Chapoutot2014].Footnote ²⁰

Racial anxiety thus nourished the “confrontational tension and fear” that Randall Collins [Reference Collins2008] has shown sets in motion the micro-machinery of violence from below, which in this case was multiplied and amplified by the macro-machinery of violence from above built by a frenetic racial state intent on reorganizing a class society along caste lines in a matter of years [Burleigh and Wippermann Reference Burleigh and Wippermann1991]. This led to a squaring of brutality, where abusive coercion feeds on itself in a spiraling movement that boosts both intensity and extensity. I call this distinctive pattern of built-in escalation fed by ethnoracial division the violence of violence [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2024c], which was in full bloom in the Jewish enclosures of the Holocaust. It is nonetheless important to stress here that racial division does not by itself mechanically determine the tenor and intensity of violence. Rather, it has to be articulated and activated by symbolic entrepreneurs—who are not always successful—and harnessed to the capital of coercion accumulated by pertinent organizations, chief among them the state [Weitz Reference Weitz, Gellately and Kiernan2003; Mann Reference Mann2005; Straus Reference Straus2006].Footnote ²¹

The Leviathan is the key vector of this dynamic escalation up to the ultimate form of violence, namely genocide, best understood as a political project at the junction of state-making and race-making aiming to purify the national society [see Aly and Heim (1991) Reference Aly and Heim2002; Browning Reference Browning2004 and Cole Reference Cole and Stone2004 on Nazi policy; see also Madley Reference Madley2016 on Amerindians in California; Bloxham Reference Bloxham2005 on Armenians in Turkey; Straus Reference Straus2018 on a panorama of African cases; KiernanReference Kiernan1996 on Cambodia and Naimark Reference Naimark2001 on Bosnia].Footnote ²²

Moreover, the state itself is not a just a space of forces, but also a space of struggles over the purpose, priorities and means of policy [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1993a], and the Nazi state was notoriously “polycratic” [Broszat (1969) Reference Broszat1981]. It comprised a plethora of agencies pursuing different agendas and each hoarding its own capital of violence and jealously commanding its delivery, including the Interior Ministry, the Wehrmacht, Reich Railways, the SS and local civil administrations. When it comes to the “ghettos” of occupied Europe, the pursuits of their German administrators vacillated between the two poles of attrition (Jews in their racial enclosure are a physical threat and a moral nuisance to be gradually degraded) and exploitation (they are a captive labor force that can be harnessed to the war economy), until the solution of extermination (they are vermin to be erased from the expanding Lebensraum of the Volksgemeinschaft) won the day in Berlin. In short, “the state” is not a violent monolith but an architectured multiplicity of violent agencies whose degree of oversight and coordination varies depending on the structure of the bureaucratic field.

Violence Embodied: The Brutalized and Brutalizing Habitus

If there is a violent capital in Bourdieu’s sense of the term, it follows logically that there exists a violent habitus resulting from its sedimentation in bodies in the form of a “set of durable and transposable dispositions” to wield and withstand physical coercion in its different forms, individual, group and institutional.Footnote ²³ Like all dispositions, the violent habitus is at once taste and ability. It is spawned by osmotic learning based on durable immersion in a familiar universe suffused with violence—growing up in a household plagued by intense domestic brutality, in a neighborhood dominated by street gangs or during a simmering civil war [Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2003]—or by didactic learning in the form of methodical instruction—as in a militia camp, a police academy or during military training and deployment.Footnote ²⁴

As with every habitus [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2014], the violent habitus has a cognitive component composed of categories of perception that detect, guide and appreciate occasions for coercion and its commission, in particular by the social, moral and spatial compartmentalization of targets [de Swaan Reference De Swaan2015]; an affective component made of patterned emotional susceptibilities and proclivities (anxiety, tension, fear, rage, resentment, pride, enjoyment, delight, exhilaration) that make violence attractive and even pleasurable; and a conative component consisting of the practical mastery of the gestures, techniques and “tricks of the trade” of violence—violence as an “ongoing practical achievement,” to borrow the words of Harold Garfinkel [Reference Garfinkel1967], pope of ethnomethodology.Footnote ²⁵ Violence is living labor assaulting living and dead labor.

In the case of Nazi agents of coercion, violence was learned via both formal training and immersive execution. In Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning [Reference Browning1992] follows the members of run-of-the-mill German police units tasked with systematically murdering Jews in the hinterland of occupied Poland, village by village, house by house, person by person, bullet by bullet. After an initial period of shock, disgust and reticence, they gradually gained the technical know-how, moral callousness and emotional profile needed to dispatch their gruesome duty—they became skilled “violence workers.”Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, in Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944–1945, Bastiaan Willems [Reference Willems2021] documents how radicalized army units returning to Germany after three years of brutal fighting on the Eastern front as the war was turning against the Axis arrived “with an ingrained barbarised mindset” that fueled a sweeping wave of intra-ethnic violence in the last-ditch defense of the homeland. Under the right conditions, violence as position and experience can turn into violence as disposition fueling violence as skilled action at ground level [Beorn Reference Beorn2014].

But we need to stress here that, in Bourdieu’s theory of practice, disposition is not action: to express itself, the violent habitus must be plunged into the appropriate situational and interactional milieu whose temporal maelstrom will always of necessity produce individual-level variations in conduct [Luft Reference Luft2015]. This means that dissecting the formation and enaction of violent inclinations must go hand in hand with deconstructing the makeup of the social worlds in which they express themselves. This is all the more necessary when we consider, by way of hypothesis (suggested by Yacine Chitour in personal communication), that the violent habitus may be a cleft habitus composed of contradictory dispositions, some civil and peaceable and some confrontational and aggressive, each activated by distinct social stimuli and organizational settings. Bourdieu’s [Reference Bourdieu2004] notations on the genesis and structure of a cleft habitus are sketchy but tantalizing: they can be extended to explain how Nazi policymakers and frontline agents could be cold “monsters” at work and caring “family men” at home.Footnote ²⁷

The distinctive features of the violent habitus or, what is the same, the “violentization” of a class, gender, ethnic or organizational habitus, entails weakening inhibition toward aggression, an increased readiness for confrontation, a lack of subjective identification with the target, moral desensitization, and emotional detachment or glee at inflicting humiliation and pain. Here, Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action converges with the symbolic interactionist model of “violentization” as the cumulative and self-reinforcing socialization to violence proposed by Lonnie Athens [1992, revised expanded edition Reference Athens2017].Footnote ²⁸ In extreme cases, violence becomes integrated in the “moral economy” of everyday life such that it grows omnipresent, expected and normalized, a currency of social valuation and exchange [Karandinos et al. Reference Karandinos, Hart, Montero Castrillo and Bourgois2014]. Where brutal world and brutal habitus meet, violence becomes doxic. Such was the case with Hitler’s “ghettos.”

What is the empirical payoff of this theoretical elaboration? It enables us to see that the Nazi enclosure of the occupied territories of Eastern Europe was a closed ecology of domination in which violent capital accumulated and violent habituses thrived and circulated unimpeded, resulting in the suffusive infliction of reticular force from threatened to minimal to lethal, from routinized to eruptive and from individual to categorical.Footnote ²⁹ Consider the fact that the enclosure was penetrated and surveilled not by one but by four different police forces, three German and one Jewish, and that police officers on all four forces resorted to violence, ranging from kicking to killing, as a matter of course [Bethke (2015) Reference Bethke2021].

Consider also that the Nazi police and military or other officials, as well as their local auxiliaries and collaborators, could storm the enclosure at any moment, invade its public and private spaces alike, and seize, beat, torture and kill its residents. They could also drag them off for forced labor and abduct them for deportation. There was no protection, recourse or remedy against this naked violence fueled by the mutual reinforcement of coercive capital and forcible habitus. As I show elsewhere [Wacquant Reference Wacquant2027a], the communal organizations built by Jews inside the Nazi enclosure were manifold and dense but thin and brittle, incapable of cushioning the shock of violence [Adler (1955) Reference Adler2017; Trunk (1962) Reference Trunk2006; Rosenfeld Reference Rosenfeld2002; Cole Reference Cole and Stone2004; Horwitz Reference Horwitz2008; Hájková Reference Hájková2020], as such institutions would be in a fully formed ghetto.Footnote ³⁰

From one angle, the historicist, the Nazi pen can thus be viewed as a formation sui generis for the intensity, frequency and multiplexity of the destructive physical force it concentrates and unleashes. From another angle, the analytical, it can be grasped as an extreme case of the virulent articulation of race, space and domination in a milieu saturated by coercion as both accumulation and disposition. This virulence can be encapsulated by the following formula: the capital of violence was the meta-capital of the Nazi enclosure inasmuch as it trumped and subordinated all other forms of capital when the question of their relative primacy was practically posed.

Searching for plausible parallels and locating historical analogues in terms of the concentration of violent capital and the unleashing of the violent habitus in targeted space is the only way to establish the specificity of the Nazi “ghetto,” so-called, not the principled postulation of its incomparability.Footnote ³¹ Consider the following cases: recurrent razzias during settler colonial conquest [Brower Reference Brower2009], the intricate layering of terroristic coercion in the Soviet Gulag [Applebaum Reference Applebaum2003], the murderous regime of British detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s [Elkins Reference Elkins2005], the cataclysmic waves of political purges under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia [Kiernan Reference Kiernan1996] and the gross brutality of everyday life in the contemporary Brazilian prison [Darke and Antillano Reference Darke and Antillano2017]. In all of these spaces, material violence rules and determines the worth, if any, of the other species of capital.

It is only through reasoned comparison that one can establish that a constellation escapes a given social type or provides an exacerbated version of the same. The cult of historical exception is not an asset but an obstacle to knowledge, as demonstrated by Detienne [Reference Detienne2000]. Historicity and analyticity are not epistemological antagonists but complementary moments in theoretical construction that allow us to delineate the particular against the backdrop of the universal. Logically, the very claim that something is “incomparable” is self-refuting, for it presupposes that a comparison has indeed been made.Footnote ³²

Theoretical Payoff of the “Capital Quintet”

To conclude, consider this question that every epistemological skeptic is bound to ask: is reconceptualizing violence as capital merely a rhetorical move with no theoretical benefits, analytic payoffs or empirical bonus? I argue, to the contrary, that the profits of this move are fivefold.

1. It reminds us that physical violence is not a thing but a social relation with broad, multifaceted and rippling effects on bodies and institutions—the two modalities of existence of history—and that as such, it strengthens, weakens or crosscuts other relations [Villarreal Reference Villarreal2024]. In short, it promotes a radically relational approach to the topic that opens new investigative vistas going beyond the conventional focus on perpetrators and victims, vistas that can conjugate the macrohistory of Nazi state formation [Kershaw Reference Kershaw2015] with the microhistory of violent practices on the ground in the commission of the Holocaust [Zalc and Bruttmann Reference Zalc and Bruttmann2017].Footnote ³³ One implication of the notion of capital as “congealed labor” is to invite us to view violence as a form of living labor that demands exertion, skills, organization, rewards and replenishment (about which more below under the rubric of habitus).Footnote ³⁴

2. Capital spotlights and ties together properties of violence that are usually treated separately, if at all: it can be accumulated, converted and delegated. Each of these processes, in turn, can be smooth or problematic and deserves its own focused inquiry. Violence can also trigger capital conversion aiming to escape it. To take a dramatic instance, what positional and dispositional properties enabled select Jews targeted for deportation inside the Nazi enclosures of World War II to dodge the transport by successfully claiming the identity of a worker, activating social relations of patronage and protection or bribing the internal Jewish police entrusted with delivering the captives slated for elimination [Corni Reference Corni2003; Finkel Reference Finkel2017]? Strategies of violence delivery and strategies of violence avoidance are joined at the hip.

3. Violence as capital compels us to bring structure and agent together by stipulating that it takes a violent habitus (system of dispositions) to fully actualize the capacity of a violent apparatus (system of positions). Now, not every agent of violence is a violent agent: many “functionaries” of the Nazi machine of racial destruction bore no special ill-will or racial animus toward its victims.Footnote ³⁵ This deviation from the theoretical stipulation invites us to raise the empirical question of the social conditions under which functionaries of violence take up their function and under what modality—as with the Einsatzgruppen who carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” with the help of the Wehrmacht in Soviet territories and the Baltic states [Desbois Reference Desbois2008; Beorn Reference Beorn2014; Lower Reference Lower2021].

4. Treating physical coercion as capital reveals that its inner core consists in the threat or the infliction of damage upon individuals, groups, institutions and things. Viewed from this angle, the capital of violence differs from its four cousins: it possesses the distinct capacity to operate both as a force of production—when it serves to plunder the possessions of and extract labor from the Jews captive in the so-called “ghettos” of the Holocaust—and as a force of destruction—when it imposes upon them famine, epidemic disease and conditions of work so brutal that it kills them off faster than it can recruit them [Trunk (1962) Reference Trunk2006; Gruner Reference Gruner2006]. This is what mandates elevating violence as a fundamental form of capital—absent which we cannot account for the deployment of material suasion in all of its forms.

Focusing on the distinctively destructive tenor of the capital of physical force also clears the way for a historical and ethnographic sociology of intimidation as a prevalent form of domination, operative in intimate, public and international spaces alike, situated at the murky interface between material and symbolic violence. This allows us to bring under the same conceptual canopy phenomenal constellations as different as “campaigning” for respect on the streets of the US inner city [Anderson Reference Anderson2000], the coercive control of intimate partners [Stark Reference Stark2007], gang extortion [Contreras Reference Contreras2013] and differential responses to genocidal impulse complicating the binary between perpetrators and victims [Luft Reference Luft2023].

5. The fifth and last implication concerns Bourdieu’s theory of practice and power. Adding material coercion to the quartet of economic, cultural, social and symbolic species to form the quintet of Bourdieu’s capitals fortifies the analytical foundations and expands the empirical reach of that theory. It fully realizes Bourdieu’s fundamental intuition, present from his early writings and no doubt shaped by his experiences as a young anthropologist working in a dying colony torn by a brutal war [Perez Reference Pérez2022], that social action is driven and patterned by force, both material and symbolic. It is revealing that a central expression in his conceptual lexicon is rapport de force (generally in the plural), whose translation in English as “relation of power” or “balance of power” does not quite convey the sense of dynamic tension and kinetic energy expended to dominate. In his description of the field as a “field of forces” and a “field of struggles,” Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu2022: 579] explicitly refers to magnetic force fields or “gravitational fields.” This is the physicalist moment in his construction of social space. This text has endeavored to heed that moment and to give it its full theoretical due.