Vigilante justice was humanity’s first attempt to restore a disrupted moral order. Later, the state attempted to transform this raw natural impulse into organized law. Yet neither revenge nor institutional punishment has ever truly healed the wound caused by unjust violence. If history teaches anything, it is that human justice is not the restoration of lost equilibrium, but the perpetual struggle to restrain Hubris and its consequences.
Is Vigilante Justice the Natural and Sole Form of Justice?
The historical assessment of Violence is among the easiest subjects in the science of Thucydides. And this is because its historiographical and critical description contains ready-made, self-evident, and natural truths, which centuries themselves documented and elevated into rules of behavior and civilization.
If the book Violence contains one major chapter in which the reference to Justice is an ongoing and permanent motif — unlike the remaining chapters on “Armed Popular Violence” and “Terrorism” — then this chapter concerns vigilante justice. In natural, primitive, and later organized societies, it constituted the fundamental rule of law and the administration of justice. “An eye for an eye” in the Hebrew legal civilization. The same perception existed throughout the archaic and ancient world.
The notion that vigilante justice is not Justice itself also emerged as one of the many side effects of the dominance of “the law of the stronger,” of possessive ownership. Along with all the other goods appropriated by the lust for power came the confiscation of the individual’s right to administer justice personally and its compulsory transfer to the Law. This was presented as an achievement and was called legal civilization. Yet these were rules established by the same Authority in order to monopolize this fundamental individual right as well and subordinate it to its own interests.
Along with weapons, the power of authority has the Law at its very core. The pursuit of personal justice is not considered a violation only when the decision is made by the Law itself — namely by systemic, professional justice. Small and great kingdoms, mighty empires alike, ensured that together with strong armies and powerful mechanisms of repression and imposition of their will, they also possessed a powerful and organized legislative body for the formation and implementation of their legal systems. And as such, these systems are rarely — and more often never — truly just.
Systemic-state “justice” is not natural justice, but its artificial form, serving the apparent necessity of establishing the state as the sole guarantor of security and administration of justice. Consequently, the existence of the paternalistic state, which the state itself propagandizes, becomes a sine qua non condition for the survival of human societies.
The truths we have presented are historical observations intended to draw conclusions, conclusions shaped by the evolution of human life through time and by the civilizations human action builds or destroys. Some of these essential conclusions, relating to today’s subject of Violence and vigilante justice as an instrument for the administration of justice, are the following:
The individual who suffers the consequences of the original violence, when the perpetrator “first raised unjust hands,” is never fully compensated — especially in cases involving loss of life — by the verdict of professional justice. Material damages may in many cases be compensated. But moral injury, as defined by natural law, is irreparable.
“Punishment” is not “Kolasis” in the sense of the terms within ancient Greek thought. The penalty imposed by Law is “punishment,” an artificial invention for the restoration of legal order, but it is not the administration of true justice.
The victim of unjust violence, especially in cases involving loss of life, is never compensated. Not even through the taking of the perpetrator’s life, much less merely through imprisonment or financial compensation.
The disturbance of legal order (“Dike” in the ancient Greek understanding), once disrupted, can never truly be restored. For this constitutes an act of Hubris. And although punishment as “Kolasis” is necessary, because behind the presumed restoration of natural and moral order there lies, in essence, a “lesson” intended to deter others from repeating or imitating Hubris.
There is no true rehabilitation of the perpetrator. Even conscious remorse does not “remove the injustice of the act,” because the corresponding price is never paid (for example, it does not bring the victim back to life), neither through the perpetrator’s death nor through the deprivation of liberty.
Vigilante justice, as “Kolasis” and not merely “punishment” of the perpetrator for the unjust act, might indeed offer personal satisfaction to the victim or the victim’s representative through revenge, but in no case DOES IT RESTORE THE NATURAL, LEGAL, AND MORAL ORDER OF THINGS. THE DISRUPTION OF NATURAL BALANCE REMAINS A “SACRILEGIOUS CRIME.”
Diotima
Your position, Homo, moves along an axis of deeply anthropological and historical interpretation of Justice: namely, that organized state justice did not abolish violence, but rather appropriated the exclusive right to exercise it. This is a line of thought stretching from ancient tragedy to modern political philosophy.
This is precisely where the great strength of your text lies: it does not treat vigilante justice as a mere “crime of passion,” but as a historical remnant of humanity’s natural need to restore a violent rupture in moral equilibrium.
Yet here the most difficult truth also emerges.
Vigilante justice was indeed born before the state. But it was also born before the civilization of detachment, proportionality, and the protection of the weak. In primitive societies, blood demanded blood not because justice was restored, but because the community possessed no other mechanism to prevent endless revenge. The vendetta was not merely honor; it was also a chain perpetuating violence.
Ancient Greek thought understood this early. The transition from the Furies to the Eumenides in the Oresteia is not merely a literary metaphor; it is the very birth of political justice. Aeschylus shows that endless blood retaliation does not heal Hubris; it multiplies it. Thus vengeance is transferred from the hand of the victim to the institution of the polis.
Yet your argument remains powerful: that neither does the institution truly heal injustice.
And indeed, it does not.
Death is not undone. Violation does not disappear. Moral injury is not balanced by years of imprisonment or financial compensation.
State justice does not restore natural order; it manages the consequences of its disruption.
This is perhaps the most critical point: human justice is not ontological restoration; it is a civilizational compromise against chaos.
The concept of “Kolasis” in the ancient Greek sense that you invoke — as educative retribution rather than simple punishment — possesses profound philosophical grounding. Punishment functions more as a public reminder of limits than as a genuine cure for evil. On this point, though from different starting points, both Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche would agree.
Yet where I would disagree with the radical primacy of vigilante justice is the following:
If natural retaliation becomes the supreme legal principle, then human society inevitably returns to the logic of power, kinship, and capacity for imposition. The strongest, the most armed, the most organized family or clan will administer “justice.” In this way, vigilante justice, though born as a natural right, historically ends up producing a new law of force.
And here lies the tragic irony:
The state monopolized violence supposedly to protect justice. Vigilante justice seeks justice, yet risks restoring the monarchy of violence.
Thus perhaps the real question is not whether vigilante justice is a “truer” form of justice than the state. Perhaps the essential question is whether any human form of justice can ever fully restore a disrupted natural balance.
And history, from Thucydides to the present day, seems to answer negatively.
Justice may be pursued. Hubris may be punished. Society may be protected.
But the wound of unjust violence never completely disappears from the world of human beings.
Perhaps this is why civilizations were built not upon perfect justice, but upon the effort to limit the imperfection of human nature.