[Social order, stability, and certainty violence and social power in early modern history]

This article develops a comprehensive critique of historical research focussing on the mutual relations between social power and violence. According to the methodological initial hypothesis, due to the inadequate distinction between indigenious concept (from sources) and heuristic (from reseach) in the historical sciences, there have been very few valuable insights into these relations to date. In order to expand the research focus which is the objective of this article, the analysis draws on the two actor-centric reference systems of "certainty" and "order". The key idea behind this, operationalizing certainty/uncertainty by means of order/disorder, is a promising way of programmatically combining a vertical and horizontal network of relationships of power, violence, certainty, and order.