Status Updates From Before Church and State: A ...

Can we not perhaps see that the growth of the assumption of primordial violence in political theory is really a part of the same historical movement as that of the development of the doctrine of the total depravity of man, of simul justus et peccator, and of the denial of transformative grace?

...the monopoly of violence that sovereignty demands is actually organizationally possible only through the technology of the modern State, and the ideological component of sovereignty-- the belief that monopolized violence is "legitimate"-- is constructed and sustained only in response to the conviction of the ubiquity of violence or scarcity...

From the preface, "In the end, the book has come to propose a narrative structure that emerges from the Christian tradition and that is, I think, capable of making sense of the data of the sources while telling a story rather different than that which is normally told."