'Torture has ceased to exist', Victor Hugo claimed, with some justification, in 1874. Yet little more than a century later, torture is used routinely in one in every three countries. This book is about torture in western society from the earliest time to the present. After a preliminary discussion of what torture is, Edward Peters describes the history of its use in civilized society from Ancient Greece to the present and examines the evolution of the legal and political theory behind it. He explains why torture was abolished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and shows hoe it was that torture re-emerged in the twentieth century not as a legal institution but as an instrument wielded directly by the state.