Abstract
This article begins with a critique of a number of sociological studies of violence that use cultural or social background variables as primary explanations for the causes of violence. Sociological studies of violence rarely analyze violence itself or violent situations as complex and multifaceted social actions that need to be theorized. As a partial response to this lack of theory, the article presents the French sociologist Luc Boltanski’s »approximated outline« of a theory of violence from the book Love and Justice as Competences. However, the article identifies a fundamental conceptual problem in Boltanski’s approach, and offers a suggestion for overcoming it by integrating a phenomenological distinction between locative, raptive and autotelic violence. The article attempts to reconstruct the foundation of a pragmatic theory of violence based, first and foremost, on a distinction between three physical forms of violence. The purpose of this reconstruction is to render French pragmatic sociology useful in studies of situations in which violence is present, and to encourage studies of a form of action that has largely been neglected by sociology