[Social order, legitimacy, and physical violence as a social fact]

The article discusses theoretical as well as methodological issues of a general sociology of violence which aims at focusing on the dynamic relationship between social order, legitimacy, and physical violence. The article argues in favor of a relational approach consisting of a realistic appraisal (in an epistemological sense) of the actors' place in a locally ordered setting of relationships among objectified forms of social order, collective identities, and social interaction. The author's long term research objective is to develop a general sociology of violence grounded in social action theory, to form a basis for exploring the phenomena of physical violence in the neo-Durkheimian sense as social facts.