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DOI: 10.1177/0725513608101907 2009 97: 26Thesis Eleven
Christopher J. FinlayHannah Arendt's Critique of Violence
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HANNAH ARENDTSCRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE
Christopher J. Finlay
ABSTRACT This article critiques the idea of instrumental
justification for violentmeans seen in Hannah Arendts writings. A
central element in Arendts argumentagainst theorists like Georges
Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is thedistinction between
instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing
thelegitimacy of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesnt
really do the workArendt needs it to in relation to rival theories.
The true distinctiveness of Arendtsview is seen when we turn to On
Revolution and resituate the later argumentsof On Violence in the
context of her ideas about the separation between revolu-tion and
liberation. Arendts commitment to the American discovery in
revolution-ary politics of a means that needs no further ends to
justify it permits a rereadingof her conception of liberation as an
attempt to envisage a violence that, whiletactically instrumental,
is at the same time politically non-instrumental. But whileArendts
view is distinct, the article also highlights important thematic
continu-ities with the writings of Sorel and Walter Benjamin.
KEYWORDS Hannah Arendt Walter Benjamin critique of violence
Frantz Fanon revolution Georges Sorel violence
I
. . . they loosed this manic Ares he has no sense of justice.
(Iliad, V.874)
What is the use of violence in revolution? For the intellectual
leadersof revolution in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1989,
it had none.Violent means, as Gandhi had argued, could only give
rise to violent ends,and violent revolutions, as Adam Michnik
warned, would eventually buildnew Bastilles (Michnik, 1985: 867;
Auer, 2004).1 The thought here, then, isthat the choice of means
limits, conditions and shapes the possible ends ofrevolution. A
politics that emerges from violent revolution will therefore
bearthe imprint of the violence that facilitated its birth. If
revolution aims at the
Thesis Eleven, Number 97, May 2009: 2645SAGE Publications (Los
Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright
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establishment of a sphere of democratic freedom liberated from
the coercivestructures of oppression, it must make a decisive break
with coercion fromthe beginning.
Although her thoughts on the essentially nonviolent nature of
politicalpower helped in some way to shape the approach to
revolution in 1989 aswell as towards its interpretation since
(Schell, 2005: 217), Hannah Arendtdoesnt seem to have shared the
view that violence is completely withoutpossible utility in
contexts of political action, revolutionary ones in particu-lar.
Her response to the global turbulence of 1968, admittedly, presents
apessimistic view on the likelihood that violence could promote a
politicalcause. Some of the most striking passages in On Violence
(1969) highlightthe fact that a stand-off between democratic
solidarity and a state that haslost its power but not its capacity
to coerce will typically see the victory ofthe forces of reaction
(Arendt, 1969: 489, 53). But even in her most scep-tical writings,
Arendt maintained that violence could sometimes be justifiedas the
means for achieving just ends, ends which were important for
politics.
My aim in this article is to interrogate the idea of
instrumental justifi-cation for violent means seen in Arendts
writings, to critique it, and to try,in some way, to reconstruct
it. To this end, I begin in Part 2 with an overviewof her various
critical remarks on the instrumental potential of violence
inrelation to politics. A central element in Arendts polemic in
1969 is thedistinction she makes between instrumental
justifications and approachesemphasizing the legitimacy of violence
or its intrinsic value. I argue thatthis doesnt really do the work
she needs it to in relation to rival theories.Part 3 examines one
of Arendts key polemical targets, Georges Sorel. I arguethat the
concept of instrumentality as it appears in On Violence fails
toexclude on its own the justifications for violence he presented.
I then turnin Part 4 to earlier writings by Arendt, centrally her
work on the AmericanRevolution in On Revolution (1990 [1963,
revised 1965]), to resituate the laterarguments in the context of
her ideas about the separations between politicsand violence, and
revolution and liberation. Arendts commitment to theAmerican
rediscovery in politics of a means that needs no further ends
tojustify it permits a rereading of her conception of revolution as
an attemptto envisage a violence that while tactically instrumental
is at the same timepolitically non-instrumental. In Part 5 I return
to the relationship betweenSorels thought and Arendts thinking in
On Revolution and On Violence takenas a whole by considering the
importance of Walter Benjamin as an inter-mediate figure.
2
Through her reflections on violence during the late 1960s and
centrallyin her short polemical work On Violence published in 1969
Arendt engagedin debate with a range of different theorists and
their followers and, through
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them, a number of distinct but interconnected theoretical
propositions. Thetheoretical propositions were fourfold: first,
that violence is a central part ofthe political, identical with or
essential to power; secondly, that violence isor should be treated
as valuable in and of itself; thirdly, that violence is
aninescapable and persistent element of human and especially
political life,rooted in or analogous to biological necessity; and,
finally, that the permis-sibility of violence relates to its
origins as distinct from its ends. These themesare interconnected
in the sense that they can be combined in various waysto form more
complex arguments. Thus, if human life is a struggle at coreand
violence a necessary part of the struggle, and if life itself is
valorized asa creative principle, then violence can be glorified
and seen as intrinsicallygood since it expresses the lan vital of
life itself, a view Arendt associatesparticularly with Sorel
(Arendt, 1969: 668). Similarly, if the psychically
orphysiologically necessary consequence of violent oppression and
exploitationis counter-violence by colonial subjects, then the
justice of that violence couldbe seen as the result of legitimate
origins rather than tactical or strategic ends,as Fanons
reflections on the Algerian war at times suggested (Fanon,
1967:468).2 The interlinking of power as coercive violence,
violence as blindnecessity and legitimacy as an index of original,
subjective provenance couldbe seen in strands of Marxist thought,
though, as Arendt emphasized, Marxhimself had said little to
indicate that he saw violence as essential to revol-utionary change
(Arendt, 1969: 11; Finlay, 2006).
Arendts engagement with these themes formed one of the
contextswithin which she made her pronouncements on the need to
justify violenceinstrumentally. In moral terms, violence, Arendt
writes, can be justifiable,but it never will be legitimate. Its
justification loses in plausibility the fartherits intended end
recedes into the future (Arendt, 1969: 52). Similarly,
therationality of violence is determined by its conduciveness to
achieving justends: Violence, being instrumental by nature, she
writes, is rational to theextent that it is effective in reaching
the end that must justify it. And sincewhen we act we never know
with any certainty the eventual consequencesof what we are doing,
violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals
(Arendt, 1969: 79).
As the correct criterion for justification, Arendt contrasts
instrumental-ity with two principles invoked erroneously in
revolutionary literature. First,legitimacy theories falsely invoke
the subjective origins of violence as vindi-cation of its justice.
For Arendt, legitimacy is something that properly belongsto power
and the solidarities through which it appears in the world:
Powerwhich springs up whenever people get together and act in
concert . . . derivesits legitimacy from the initial getting
together rather than from any action thatthen may follow. Thus, a
challenge to legitimacy will properly be met withan appeal to the
past. By contrast, the goal-orientated nature of the
violentinstrument seeks validation from an end that lies in the
future, i.e. whatArendt calls justification (Arendt, 1969: 52). The
second error is to treat
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violence as valuable in and of itself, without reference either
to origins orends, hence Arendts remark in the introduction to On
Revolution:
A theory of war or a theory of revolution . . . can only deal
with the justificationof violence because the justification
constitutes its political limitation; if, instead,it arrives at a
glorification or justification of violence as such, it is no
longerpolitical but antipolitical. (Arendt, 1990: 19)
Instrumental justification thus appears as a key criterion for
Arendt indistinguishing her account of permissible violence from
the theories of Sorel,Fanon and others. Along with Vilfredo Pareto,
Sorel and Fanon are amongthe few theorists who glorified violence
for violences sake, Arendt (1969:65) writes (though Sartres idea
that violence can be recreative of the humanbeing is included in
the sweep of this argument). And legitimacy andnecessity
contributed to the arguments through which their valorization
ofviolence as good in itself was promoted (Arendt, 1969; Finlay,
2006).
There are, however, some important qualifications to Arendts
endorse-ment of instrumental justifications in On Violence. First
of all, while justifi-cation is to be preferred to approaches
emphasizing legitimacy, Arendt isemphatic that the relationship
between means and ends is too uncertain inimportant respects for
violence to become a safe and reliable instrument inpolitics. There
are two difficulties: first, violence is inherently arbitrary
andunpredictable in its results as some of the statements quoted
above empha-size. Even without the means of violence, action in
general is unpredictable.But while uncoerced and non-coercive
political action is a good in itself, inArendts view, violence can
be valorized only by its attainment of just ends;unpredictability
therefore stands as an important limit on its
justifiability.Secondly, violence, Arendt maintains, is generative,
as Patricia Owens putsit. Far from slavishly pursuing the ends in
whose services it has been enlisted,violence tends to overwhelm its
putative ends, undermining them, renderingthem impossible, or
displacing them by creating conditions giving rise to newends
(Arendt, 1969: 10, 54; Owens, 2007: 57). From both problems
Arendtconcludes that the most likely result of using violence is
that it will lead tomore violence (Arendt, 1969: 80).
Finally, perhaps the most significant qualification to Arendts
view arisesfrom the tension she perceived between two opposing
moral possibilities:action, on the one hand, as the means of
revealing the self in the visibleworld circumscribed by
public-political space; and violence, on the other,as an
instrumentalization which diminishes the capacity of both persons
andlanguage to achieve self-disclosure (Arendt, 1998: 1801).
Considered fromthis point of view, violence is inimical to
politics, a point which Arendt driveshome with great vehemence
throughout On Violence but which forms a con-tinuous theme in her
published work. It suggests that the idea that justifica-tion
stands as a political limitation, ambiguous in the passage quoted
above,is crucial to Arendts complex thinking on the relationship
between violent
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instruments, justifying ends and politics (see Frazer and
Hutchings, 2008:924). For Arendt, the material barriers by which
the Greek polis marked theline between political life, animated by
speech and action, and the inter-political realm (the space between
one polis and another), in which muteforce was the typical element,
retained vital symbolic significance in her neo-classical critique
of contemporary political thought.
These few comments underline thematic concerns and principles
centralto Arendts philosophical position on violence and the
political: violence canbe justified by ends which relate to
politics; the relationship between justifi-cation and politics
marks a limitation, which points towards Arendts reluc-tance to
regard violence as something which can occur within politics;
thejustification of violence dissipates with extension in time and
space, and sowith an eye on historical experience even instrumental
justifications are tobe regarded sceptically; the justice of
violence has nothing to do with itsorigins; and finally, violence
isnt and shouldnt be seen as good in itself.
So of what use is violence supposed to be, in Arendts thought?
Whatinstrumental goals can it be expected to serve and how? And how
do theserelate to politics? I want to try and shed some light on
these questions notsimply by examining Arendts writings alone, but
by examining the thoughtsof some of those whom she regarded as
theoretical adversaries and thentrying to clarify the differences
between her position and theirs. Looking atSorel in particular will
show how Arendts position was, in fact, much morecomplicated than
reading On Violence on its own would seem to suggest. Ilook,
therefore, in Part 3, at Sorels theory of revolutionary violence
beforereconstructing Arendts broader philosophical view in Part 4
and then follow-ing through the comparison in Part 5.
3
Both Sorels view and Fanons were influential examples, Arendt
main-tained, of the tendency to glorify violence for its own sake
and both wereguilty of introducing the elements of legitimacy and
necessity as parts oftheir more general approach to the justice of
political violence (Arendt, 1990:65). I will argue, however, that
the positions they presented were less vulner-able to the line of
argument taken in On Violence than Arendts fairly abruptdismissal
seems to suggest. Both authors add to their legitimist and
deter-minist lines of justification a further, instrumentalist line
which, at least atfirst glance, seems to be consistent with Arendts
view. Showing where thethree authors are closest will allow me in
subsequent sections to elucidatemore clearly the elements in
Arendts more general approach towards revol-ution and violence that
render it distinctive in a more decisive way. For thesake of space,
Ill limit detailed discussion to Sorels ideas and make
briefercomparisons with Fanon inter alia.3
First of all, its necessary to point out intricacies in Sorels
view thatArendts remarks seem to belie. In his Reflections on
Violence (1999 [1908]),
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Sorel wrote that proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and
simple mani-festation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears .
. . as a very fine andheroic thing; it is at the service of the
immemorial interests of civilization.While it is not perhaps the
most appropriate method of obtaining immedi-ate material
advantages, he adds, it may save the world from barbarism(Sorel,
1999 [1908]: 85). This passage reflects a complexity in Sorels
approachtowards justification that goes beyond Arendts statement on
glorification.Certainly Sorels first remark reflects a view on the
glory of revolutionaryviolence underwritten by the legitimacy of
its origins in proletarian revolu-tionary consciousness. But the
full sense of Sorels valorization of violenceis only seen in the
second and third propositions.
On the face of it, the second proposition, that violence isnt
the mostappropriate method of obtaining immediate material
advantages, appears toreject instrumentalist justifications for the
use of violence and there is sometruth to this view. Although
Arendt describes him as thinking about classstruggle in military
terms (Arendt, 1969: 12), Sorel thought that the kind ofcoercive
violence seen in war had little or no role to play in revolution.
Attimes he does compare class warfare to conventional military
force, but Sorelregarded the practice of violence in class war in a
very different light fromthe Clausewitzian view on military
engagement. Carl von Clausewitz capturesthe essence of war in the
images of duelists and wrestlers. Each belligerentapplies force to
his opponent to try and break his will and one succeedswhen the
other bows to his wishes (Clausewitz, 1993: 83). Sorel doesnt
treatpersonal violence as an instrument for wresting concessions
from an opponentas Clausewitz does. Where the final tactical
confrontation of revolution even-tually occurs, it is in what
Arendt recognized as the essentially nonviolentact of the
proletarian general strike (Arendt, 1969: 12; see also Frazer
andHutchings, this issue). Thus, what for Clausewitz is the aim of
militaryviolence, to throw [ones] opponent in order to make him
incapable of furtherresistance, was, for Sorel, the aim of
nonviolent action (Clausewitz, 1993: 83).The utility of personal
violence as such was seen not in the exertion of forceagainst the
opponents of revolution, but in its capacity to provoke and
inspireand to mark the separation of classes (Sorel, 1999 [1908]:
1056). By thesemeans it could shape the emergence of polarizing
forces in society and thushelp to bring about a general strike
through which one force would finallysuccumb to the other. This is
what Sorels first and third propositions reflect:violence is at the
service of the immemorial interests of civilization [and] itmay
save the world from barbarism. Civilization was under threat from
abarbarous intermixing of the old bourgeois and the new proletarian
orders,each corrupted through compromise with the other. Violence,
Sorel believed,would prevent this from happening.
For Sorel, the justification of violence is therefore in part an
instru-mental one (Frazer and Hutchings, 2007: 1834). Though its
purpose is notto defeat the armed forces of a state in fixed
battle, it is instrumental inradicalizing political consciousness.
This it does, in the first instance, by
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preventing government from consolidating power through cautious
policy.Sorel shared with many advocates of armed force later in the
20th centurythe fear that genuine revolutionary liberation could be
prevented by a rulingclass willing to gild the chains of
oppression, perpetuating the dominantorder by making it as
comfortable as possible for those in whose interestsit would
otherwise be destroyed (on which, compare Fanon, 1967: 4852).Sorels
response was to develop a version of la politique du pire
(Ignatieff,2004: 61). He envisaged forms of violence capable of
provoking the rulingelements into forceful repression and
compelling the bourgeoisie to play itshistoric role in the
unfolding drama of capitalist hubris in full. The violenceof
repression and renewed exploitation would in turn reinforce the
conscious-ness of the proletariat, consolidating it around a clear
interest, inimical to thestatus quo, and purifying it of the last
vestiges of attachment to bourgeoisculture and science.
Sorels glorification of violence occurs in the context of his
wider strat-egic approach to revolutionary escalation and
confrontation, comprising, ineffect, a second element to follow the
use of violence in provocation. Again,in this second moment the
utility of violence is something different fromClausewitzian
tactical force. Glorification occurs instead in the context of
atheatrical approach to violence. To achieve the will to act, to
destroy asthoroughly as possible the old order, and to create the
new, the revolution-aries, Sorel argued, must be animated by a
myth. The myth would constitutea narrative through which the
proletariat could imagine, orientate and moti-vate itself in a
historic struggle with its enemies. Violent actions against
theforces of order would engender the myth of a cataclysmic
struggle betweentwo great, elemental life forces, inspiring those
who saw it or heard its storytold with the idea of imitating and
following it. The energy this myth gener-ated would in turn feed
the real moment of tactical force, the proletarian strikewhich
dealt the final crippling blow to the bourgeois order, killing
capitalistsociety and its state apparatus in a single moment
(Sorel, 1999 [1908]).
For Sorel, therefore, the occurrence of personal violence neednt
bewidespread or even, necessarily, successful from a tactical point
of view. Itsutility its availability as an instrument in
revolutionary politics arises fromthe possibility that it can be
acted out and dramatized theatrically, contribut-ing to the
construction of a narrative the myth of the general strike
intowhich the proletarian can insert himself in fantasy and,
eventually, in action.Violence contributes to myth and feeds the
passions it engenders throughglorification and the myth both
precipitates the fall of the old order andshapes the political
consciousness through which the new is built. Violence,however, is
not glorified for its own sake, as Arendt thought. Its
glorifica-tion occurs because to heroize violence is useful as part
of a political strategyfor revolution. Thus while violence lacks an
immediate justification as atactical-military instrument, it is
given an instrumental justification mediatedthrough political
strategy.
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If Sorels Reflections on Violence do tend to glorify violence,
they doso in a way that might appear justified by the political
ends that theatricalviolence can potentially help bring about. Its
not, therefore, entirely clearthat Arendts view as stated in On
Violence excludes Sorels revolutionaryviolence from its permissive
reach. This is arguably true for Fanon too. InThe Wretched of the
Earth, violence is the only antidote to the crushing ofthe subjects
agency by the unmediated violence of colonialism. But the utilityof
violence isnt primarily seen in its ability to overwhelm the armed
forcesof colonial empire. Instead, it is a function of its
therapeutic promise as theparticipation of empires victims in
counter-violence helps them to claim backtheir dignity and to heal
the psychological wounds inflicted by the settlers.Again for Fanon
as for Sorel it is the image of violent confrontation at leastas
much as the tactical effectiveness of violence in real battle that
effects achange in the political situation. But it is the effect of
change, among otherthings, that gives justification to bloodshed:
as with Sorel, the violence reflectedin Fanons Wretched of the
Earth may be justified at least in part by instru-mentality (Fanon,
1967).
Both Sorel and Fanon invoke legitimacy and necessity in Arendts
sensein relation to the justification of violence. For both, the
emergence of anauthentic, revolutionary form of subjectivity is
essential to validating revol-utionary actions in general, both
those constitutive of the new order andthose destructive of the
old. Similarly, both present accounts of the aetiologyof violence
in which it may be seen as an inescapable part of the
humancondition. But notwithstanding these dimensions of Sorels and
Fanonsthought, both theorists also account for the justice of
revolutionary violencepartly in reference to its usefulness in
achieving political goals. Both, there-fore, may be defensible in
relation to Arendts argument that the justice orrationality of
violence is principally a function of its instrumental utility.
Asthings stand, therefore, the polemical attack she directed
against them in thelate 1960s seems to leave open the possibility
of a partial vindication of boththeorists. I turn, therefore, to
Arendts earlier and more elaborate discussionsof the role of
violence in revolution to seek a clearer view on what may beseen as
differentiating her position from those of her intellectual
rivals.
4
To distinguish Arendts view from those of Sorel and Fanon, it is
necess-ary to turn to the matter of how the goals that can justify
violence, in Arendtsaccount, relate to politics. How can Arendt at
once insist that violence bejustified instrumentally but that it be
excluded from politics properly speaking?Is it true on the latter
view that there can be no such thing as politicallyjustified
violence or even of political violence as such? In which case,
whatends can justify violence and how do these ends relate to
political ends? Inthe context of revolution, and especially, for
Arendt, the American Revolution
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where violence is historically an inescapable fact (Andress,
2005: 2), this willbe a question of how violence is supposed to
serve the revolution withoutbeing seen to serve political ends as
such and thus to enter the non-violentspaces and actions of
politics proper.
Arendts analysis of the relationships between violence and
revolutionfollows the ontological categories traced in The Human
Condition, categoriesshe thought had been confused and
short-circuited in the traditions ofmodern revolution that emerged
after 1789. Moreover, the collapse of onto-logical categories into
one another, of acting into making and of politics intofabrication,
appeared, in her analysis, as the result of aberrant developmentsin
European history in thought, action and institutional practice
trace-able back to the last days of the Roman Empire. The Americans
escaped thelogic of Western, post-Roman political concepts in
actions that had strayedfortuitously beyond their limits. But the
French remained trapped within them(Arendt, 1990: e.g. 15961, 202;
1998).
The fundamental problem for modern revolutions, Arendt argued,
wasthat of beginning, of establishing something genuinely new in
historical time(Arendt, 1990: 279, 34, 213). This arose only
through the historical experi-ence of the modern era, discovered by
the revolutionaries of the late 18thcentury in the course of the
revolutions themselves, but not intended as apolitical goal
(Arendt, 1990: 29). With this new experience came the atten-dant
problems of conceptualizing and stabilizing the new beginning in
lastinglaws and institutions. Arendt uses a comparison of the two
revolutions tospecify, on the one hand, the dangers of admitting
violence into politics atthe moment of revolutionary beginning,
and, on the other, the limits whichrevolutions must respect if they
are to avoid the catastrophes of revolution-ary Terror and the
stillbirth of the new political order.
The task of founding and stabilizing a new beginning was
vitiatedentirely for the French, partly as a result of the
conceptual-pragmatic legaciesof the medieval Christian order and
early-modern absolutism, its offspring(Arendt, 1990: 15561). The
French Revolution fell into the characteristicallypost-Roman idea
that new beginnings in secular history could occur onlywith the
intervention of a maker. In the Judaeo-Christian conception
ofhistorical time, the problem of beginning is solved with
reference to a Creatorwho exists outside the temporal stream of his
creation (Arendt, 1990: 2056).With the collapse of the Old Regime,
the French encountered the problemof beginning in the historical
present. Their solution took a similar form asthey drew on James
Harringtons non-Roman assumption that the means ofviolence which
indeed are ordinary and necessary for all purposes of fabri-cation
are needed in the establishment of a new or the renovation of an
oldconstitution. This is so precisely because something is created,
not out ofnothing, but out of given material which must be violated
in order to yielditself to the formative processes out of which a
thing, a fabricated object,will arise (Arendt, 1990: 208; 1998:
13940).
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The idea of political beginning as fabrication invoked a
conceptualfoundation for the kinds of instrumentalism that Arendt
rejected in politics.Its results were seen in the attempt to master
both the social problem ofpoverty and the political problem of
constituting power and legality bymeans of the coercive instruments
of government. By this category mistake,Arendt argued, action was
crowded out by concepts of production, and itwas this that drew
violence into the vortex of revolutionary politics, as
therevolutionary legislator was cast in the role of constitutional
manufacturerand the politician in that of a social engineer.
The fundamental difference between the revolutions in America
andFrance was seen in how each addressed the matter of founding a
new politi-cal and legal order. For the French, this presented
itself as a single, unitaryproblem. Both legality and power were to
be established simultaneously.The problem of foundation raised in
turn the question of legitimacy, i.e. ofachieving an external
authority upon which to ground both. The influentialbut ultimately
unsuccessful solution of the Abb Siyes was to introduce
anessentially fictional distinction between the pouvoir constituant
and thepouvoir constitu, the latter deriving authority from the
former. Its practicalresult was the deification of the people, the
very agent that would under-mine the foundations of the new polity
and bring a flood of violence intorevolutionary politics (Arendt,
1990: 1624, 183).
The American narrative, in Arendts account, had disaggregated
whatthe French mistakenly fused together. Centrally, it decoupled
revolutionfrom the acts of liberation that accompanied it, enabling
Arendt to trace aline dividing politics proper and the foundation
of freedom from war andviolence more generally (Arendt, 1990: 142,
299). Whereas the foundationof a new power in France occurred
simultaneously with the constitution ofa new legal order, the
foundations of power in America had been laid alreadyin the period
prior to the outbreak of violence in the 1770s. At least
symbol-ically, the divergence of American practice from the
European, post-Romanthought occurred as early as the Mayflower
compact. Unwittingly, the settlerswho bound themselves together
through mutual promises while crossing theAtlantic on their way to
the New World instantiated an alternative mode bywhich power could
constitute itself and, hence, a new way to begin politi-cally.
Arendt distinguished this kind of compact between equals from
thosesocial contracts that theorists imagine between individuals
and governments.Where individuals are supposed to bind themselves
in a single act to adurable government, a real sacrifice is made as
the subject hands over certainnative rights to the ruler. And where
governments are authorized to act evenagainst the wishes of those
who originally created them, an external author-ity is therefore
needed to validate and guarantee the deal, one before whomboth
parties to the contract make their pledge. By contrast,
individualsengaging in mutual promises like the American
covenanters need noexternal source of authority or enforcement.
They engage in the covenant
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in full mutual visibility, each only gaining and none alienating
any powerthat pre-existed their agreement. Power instead emerges
from the compactwhere none existed before, a solidaristic power the
kind Arendt outlinesagain in On Violence that needed no coercion or
instruments of violenceand no external third party to lend it the
appearance of authority (Arendt,1990: 16974).
Already, then, long before the War of Independence, Arendt
argued, theAmerican settlers had discovered ways to found power
without replicatingthe relation of rule and its coercive demands.
For the Americans, the storyof the Mayflower compact which first
instantiated the constitutive power ofpromising continued with the
multiplication of powers that emerged at alllevels in American
society while under British sovereignty. And in the contextof
constitution-building later on, the notion of mutual agreement
marked areappearance of the originally Roman idea of law as the
agreement betweentwo parties rather than the relation between
rulers and ruled (Arendt, 1990:1879). When the Founding Fathers
came to create a constitution for theUnited States, crucially they
sought to draw these smaller powers into thegreater federative
power of the new political entity instead of displacing themwith a
new sovereign monopoly at the centre. They thus avoided creatinga
vacuum of the kind seen in France during the 1790s. And by drawing
onpower that came from non-coercive mutual promising, they kept
open apublic space for political action purified of the violent
instrumentalities thatwould repeatedly tear the French polity apart
(Arendt, 1990: 1514, 16974).
The American narrative thus provided Arendt with a critical
counterpointto the French experience. Its great insights concerning
the constitutive actof beginning were seen in its flagrant
opposition to the age-old and stillcurrent notions of the dictating
violence, necessary for all revolutions andhence supposedly
unavoidable in all revolutions (Arendt, 1990: 213). TheAmerican
Revolution instantiated Arendts neo-classical ideal of a
non-instrumental politics in two senses: first, in the new politys
own self-constitution violence was absent and unnecessary from the
start, a start whichpredated the War of Independence; secondly,
having eliminated violencefrom the constitutive act, it was
eliminated from the spaces created by thatact. As Arendt wrote
towards the end of her analysis, paraphrasing Plato:For the
beginning, because it contains its own principle, is also a god
who,as long as he dwells among men, as long as he inspires their
deeds, saveseverything. Just as a violent act of foundation would
create institutionspervaded by violence, so a nonviolent initiation
could establish the principleof a politics purified of violent
means for posterity (Arendt, 1990: 213).
So if violence is and ought to be excluded from the acts of
politi-cal foundation and legal self-constitution, then what role
does it actually playin this story? The answer is in the context of
liberation, which Arendt distin-guishes from revolution properly
speaking. Whereas revolution is identifiedwith the beginning of a
new order, liberation occurs with the end of an old
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one. Whatever the precise sequence of events in historical time,
revolutionis the process through which a new beginning is made,
first and foremostthrough the creation of solidaristic power. As
such, it is a process which hasonly a contingent and indirect
relationship with violence, if violence occursat all. Violence,
where it does occur, is the act through which powers suchas those
already established in America or powers that are only beginning
toemerge elsewhere like the workers Soviets in Russia in 1917
defend thespaces they have opened up for non-violent, political
action from the forcestrying to suppress or destroy them. Violence
is thus justified as the means ofdefence and it is instrumental in
serving the preservation of solidaritiescreated through otherwise
non-violent interaction.
Violence is thus something whose instrumentality occurs outside
thepolitical solidarity. It is used not between participants as
rulers against ruled,but between those inside the civil compact and
those outside who come tothreaten them and the power they have
made.4 Hence violence is justifiedas a direct tactical instrument
that serves justifying ends that are political inone sense, but
without entering the public space which is the proper domainof
politics (for a similar point, see Frazer and Hutchings, 2008: 92).
Violencemay be political, therefore, not in the sense that it
serves political ends, butin the sense that it serves politics as
such, i.e. the possibility of creating andpursuing political ends
in public freedom.
The key difference, therefore, between Arendts view and that of
Sorel(and Fanon) lies not so much in the importance given to
instrumental justifi-cation as such as in their differing construal
of the means-end relation. Thedifference is twofold, relating both
to the question of which ends can providejustification for violence
and that of how they do so. Sorels instrumentaljustification
presents violence in a productive role, shaping political
conscious-ness and hence the political orders that consciousness is
capable of gener-ating. The justification for physical force
between one person and another,on this account, is mediated through
the effects that the action is likely tohave on various third
parties and their subsequent political interactions. Thejustifying
end, therefore, isnt the immediate tactical-military one of
defeatingthe person against whom force is used, but a political,
mediated one. Byprovoking confrontation and shaping political
consciousness, violence in asense serves political ends directly;
but by the same means, it serves thetactical ends of defeating an
enemy only indirectly. While the immediateopponent in the physical
act of violence may or may not be defeated itdoesnt matter for
Sorel the political consequences of the act will lead ulti-mately
to a (non-violent) confrontation in the general strike which
bringsabout final and complete tactical victory for the
revolutionaries.
Arendts view, by contrast, sees violence as justified only by
the directmilitary-tactical or strategic aim of defeating an enemy,
someone presentingphysical obstacles or threats. Political goals as
such provide only indirectjustification, if they can truly be said
to provide justification at all. Thus,
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whereas for Sorel and Fanon, politics and the instrumentality of
violence areimmediately connected, Arendts view, as Owens has
emphasized (Owens,2007: 2531), is structured around a strict
distinction and separation betweenmilitary tactics and strategy on
the one hand and politics on the other. ForArendt, justified
violence corresponds not to political revolution as such butto war
and (wars of) liberation. Her view of the instrumental
effectivenessof violence in the context of liberation follows the
Clausewitzian understand-ing of war as an encounter with the
coercive strength of an enemy, in whichcounter-force is deployed
with the aim of neutralizing it directly and over-whelming it. This
kind of military violence has the purely negative useful-ness of
helping to eliminate external threats. By contrast, all the
positivepolitical acts through which revolutionary movements,
emerging powers, andlegal and political constitution occur are part
of a discrete process, perhapsfacilitated negatively and indirectly
by violence, but themselves consistingonly of the nonviolent
elements of action and speech. The most dangerousphilosophical
views, from this perspective, were those which short-circuitthe
distinction as Sorel and Fanon did between military strategy and
politi-cal self-constitution. (Arendt uses the word constitution in
Paines sense: Aconstitution is not the act of a government, but of
a people constituting agovernment.) It was by envisaging forms of
violence whose instrumentalpotential was seen in terms not of
military but of political strategy, mediatedthrough theatricality
rather than justified by immediate tactical effectiveness,that
thinkers such as Sorel and Fanon threatened to reproduce the errors
ofthe French Revolution.
5
Crucially, then, Arendts view can be seen as highly distinctive
in relationto Sorels and the difference in approach between the two
theorists doeshinge in important respects on the question of
instrumental justification.Before concluding this article, however,
I want to suggest some other waysin which Arendts and Sorels views
are more closely connected and evensimilar than is usually
supposed. To see these, it is necessary to bring intodiscussion the
intermediate figure of Walter Benjamin. Highlighting import-ant
resonances between Benjamins Critique of Violence and Arendts
textspermits a fuller exploration both of Arendts intellectual
relationship with Soreland of her critique of violent means and
political ends.
As Beatrice Hanssen remarks, there is a conspicuous absence of
anyreference in Arendts writings on violence to Benjamins
influential Critique(Hanssen, 2000: 16), a text which registers
strongly the influence of Soreland which addresses key themes
common to both Sorel and Arendt. Arendtknew Benjamin personally and
was intimately acquainted with at least someof his work
(Young-Bruehl, 2004: 1603, 1668; Arendt, 1992). Moreover, atthe
time of her death, Arendt was preparing for publication a second
volume
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of selected pieces by Benjamin that was to include the Critique
itself. Thereis therefore more than a purely speculative basis for
making comparisonsbetween her thoughts on revolutionary violence
and Benjamins. I want tosuggest, first of all, that there are
significant similarities in the concerns ofBenjamins and Arendts
texts. Some of these, secondly, can in turn be tracedback to Sorel
(whose influence is explicitly flagged in Benjamins text),marking,
perhaps unexpectedly in light of Arendts On Violence, a
positivelink between her thought and Sorels syndicalist
appropriation of Marxism.Central to these concerns are the
relationships between political ends andviolent means, i.e. the
basic terms constitutive of instrumental justification.
There is, to begin with, an important general similarity in the
natureof those concerns animating Benjamins Critique and Arendts
works onrevolution and violence: both seek a way to envisage a
revolutionary politi-cal beginning capable of resisting the fateful
cycles of violence seen in thepast, i.e. a revolution that marks a
beginning precisely in the sense that itescapes these cycles. Like
Arendt, Benjamin conceptualizes the problem ofviolence as one
centrally requiring critical interrogation of the
relationshipbetween means and ends, first of all, and secondly, as
a challenge to legal-positivist accounts of the legitimacy of
violent means considered indepen-dently of just ends. Also like
Arendt, Benjamin sketches out the conceptualbasis for a critique of
European history in which violence and law havebecome entangled in
a seemingly inescapable constellation which threatensto efface any
possibility of a politics in which true and non-coercive forms
ofhuman flourishing can be realized. Finally, both philosophers try
to envisagea means to begin anew that can break through the
historical continuum in amoment of force that occurs in such a way
as to avoid violent relationshipsre-entering the new era,
corrupting it and dragging it back into the old fatefulcycle. Both
seek, in Giorgio Agambens words, a dissolution of the linkbetween
violence and the law (Agamben, 1998: 31; Polsky, 2005: 79).
For Benjamin, means and ends are related in problematic ways,
eitherin the form of law-making violence or law-preserving
violence. In theformer, violence posits ends that will be embodied
in law; in the latter, itsecures the laws through coercion and the
punishment of a guilt that violenceitself created in the first
place: the function of violence in lawmaking istwofold, Benjamin
writes,
in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as
its means,what is to be established as law, but at the moment of
instatement does notdismiss violence; rather, at this very moment
of lawmaking, it specifically estab-lishes as law not an end
unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and inti-mately bound to
it, under the title of power. (Benjamin, 1996: 248)
This fateful interpenetration of violent means and legal ends
appears inArendt in the twofold evil of a doctrine that sees
revolutionary violence as acreative force and coercive rule as a
norm of political life.
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Both Benjamin and Arendt seek to envisage forms of violence,
force, andpower (all possible translations of Benjamins Gewalt)
that can, so to speak,violently break the fateful cycle of
law-making and law-preserving violencewithout carrying violence
over into the new beginning they seek to initiate.5
For Benjamin, the idea of this final violence is expressed in
the Divine violenceof pure means by which the guilt of the past is
expiated without positing anew law and with it a new guilt
(Benjamin, 1996: 252). The Hebrew story ofGods sudden and final
destruction of the company of the Korah provideshis illustration,
contrasting with the mythical story of Niobe who is left
behindhaving been punished through the death of her children. In
both cases, thereare physical deaths. The salient difference
appears in the fact that, with Niobe,a law asserts itself in the
fact of the bloodshed and she is left among theliving both as an
eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone onthe
frontier between men and gods (Benjamin, 1996: 248). Law itself is
almostliterally written in blood. For the Israelites, by contrast,
the Divine violenceinscribes no new law. In Benjamins account, it
merely annihilates somethingold: as Giorgio Agamben puts it, [t]he
proper characteristic of this violenceis that it neither makes nor
preserves law, but deposes it (Agamben, 2005:53). It isnt a
beginning or an attempt to prolong a law; it is an ending only.
Arendts image of liberation in which violence appears as the
merelynegative moment of casting off the legal-coercive structures
of the past orderreflects a similar idea to Benjamins. In
destroying the old law in its complicitrelationship with violence,
truly liberating violence makes way for a new kindof non-coercive
order that is beginning or has already begun within. ForArendt,
like Benjamin, violence becomes problematic and threatens to
vitiateany attempt at a true new beginning as soon as it tries to
do anything positive,to create, to shape, to posit new conceptions
of justice, to constitute or positnew laws. So instead, it is given
only the role of undertaker for the past:where the forces of
reaction stand armed against the forces of freedom andrefuse to
stand down, then violence may do its work (if, that is, it
hassufficient strength to defeat them). Its action is purely
negative and immedi-ate: its purpose is to annihilate, not to
discipline.6
In light of Benjamins account, we can add some further nuance to
theinterpretation of Arendts instrumentalism. Benjamin rejects both
natural lawand positivist couplings of violent means with justified
and justifying ends.Through his philosophy of history, he tries to
see beyond the positivistattempt to tie legal ends, justified by
history, with the means coercive insti-tutions needed to realize
them. This is the counterpoint to his violence ofpure means which
destroys without positing or seeking to reinforce ends.Arendt too
puts a gap between means and ends here: the violent means
ofliberation are not linked positively to political ends as such,
as weve seen; tothe extent that they serve anything approximating
to an end, they serve thepurely negative purposes of preventing
destructive forces from eliminatinga space within which freedom can
occur. This liberating violence, then,
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appears itself as a kind of pure means in the sense that it isnt
connectedto ends that will draw it back into the coercive cycles of
fate. By the sametoken, the action which occurs within the
political space can also appear asa pure means inasmuch as it needs
no guidance by ends beyond itself forjustification or rationality
(Arendt, 1990: 33; Habermas, 1979: 55).
Characterizing Arendts thought in this way casts light on
importantcommon rather than divergent elements between her approach
towardsrevolutionary violence and Sorels. For Sorel, as for
Benjamin and Arendt,the problem of revolutionary violence is one of
envisaging a moment of forcethat could disable and dismantle the
old without reintroducing a corruptingelement into the new. And as
with Arendt particularly, it is the figure of theJacobin who
embodies the great warning from history of what can happenif
revolutionaries think about their actions in the wrong way. For
Sorel, themost dangerous contemporary fallacy prevalent among
parliamentary social-ists was the notion that the state could be
used as an instrument for bringingabout social progress. By
attempting to harness its irreducibly coercive mech-anisms,
revolutionaries acting through the state inevitably inclined
towardsTerror (Sorel, 1999 [1908]: 289).
Sorels reaction to this conception of politics and its
appearance in theFrench Revolutionary Terror bears close
resemblance to Arendts. For Sorel,any attempt to use policy to
impose change, however well-meaning, carriesthe threat of a renewed
Jacobinism: if, by chance, our parliamentary social-ists come to
power, he predicts, they will prove themselves worthy succes-sors
of the Inquisition, of the ancien regime and of Robespierre.
Utopianameliorism, he thought, was irredeemably terrorist due to
the coercive natureof the instrument it deployed. Any attempt,
consequently, to take over govern-ment would corrupt the
revolution, steering it towards terror, as its ends wouldbe
irrecoverably conditioned by the means chosen to try and achieve
them.He condemns, therefore, those who teach the people that they
ought to carryout we know not what highly idealistic decrees of a
progressive justice. Theywork to maintain those ideas about the
State which provoked the bloody actsof 93 (Sorel, 1999 [1908]:
1056). As a self-styled pessimist, Sorel arguedthat only
catastrophe offered hope for change that could offer true
chancesfor human emancipation. Through catastrophe, entire orders
were engulfed,clearing spaces within which wholly new ones could
emerge (Sorel, 1999[1908]: 1256). For contemporary revolutionaries
who sought to achieveemancipation through revolutionary action,
therefore, it was crucial to by-passthe state. Thus Sorels
Proletarian violence, by contrast with contemporarysocialism and in
common with the forms of force envisaged both by Benjaminand
Arendt, was intended to break irrevocably with legal coercion and
thelaw. It would change entirely the appearance of all the
conflicts in which itplays a part, since it disowns the force
organized by the bourgeoisie andwants to suppress the State which
serves as its central nucleus (Sorel, 1999[1908]: 1718).
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Arendts critique of revolutionary violence can therefore be seen
as anattempt to address a problematic with which both Sorel and
Benjamin hadearlier engaged, viz. how to envisage a true
revolutionary break in histori-cal time through which new political
spaces could open, freed from force.Arendts stylized narrative of
the American Revolution presents in concretehistorical form an
alternative vision of the revolutionary act to Sorels generalstrike
(perhaps we should say an alternative myth; see Honig, 1993: 76,
96),one which re-establishes classical forms of political action
rather than Sorelssocial ideal of industrial syndicalism. Equally,
it postulates a possible escapefrom the fateful cycles of Benjamins
Critique of Violence in which violencecontinually establishes,
conserves or replaces a seemingly endless sequenceof political
orders, each proving just as coercive as the last. But while
forBenjamin the escape from cyclical-historical time occurs with
the rupturemade by a Divine violence that expiates the mythical
violence of the secularworld, for Arendt it was the
Judaeo-Christian conception of the Divine thatengendered the
problem. It was this conception of a transcendent moment,external
to the world, that guaranteed the perseverance of attempts at
violentpolitical making. Only a return to the classical and
especially the Romanunderstanding of power and law offered hope of
an escape. On the otherhand, Arendts conception of politics as
properly realized in a freedom thatescapes instrumental
subordination to ends recalls Benjamins vision of apolitics of pure
means as the conceptual gate through which escape fromthe violent
instrumentalities of law-making and law-preserving force ismade.
Arendt can thus be seen as presenting an attempt to solve the
riddlethat Benjamin set and which, in part, he sourced in Sorels
myth of the prole-tarian strike.
6
To conclude, the question of how violence, instrumentality and
thepolitical relate to one another illuminates a complicated set of
relationshipsbetween Arendts thoughts and those of Sorel and
Benjamin. The three theor-ists appear closest in their challenge to
the modern practice of political poweras coercive rule. Sorel,
Benjamin and Arendt all seek to envisage a form ofrevolutionary
engagement through which the state as the embodiment of
thispractice could be by-passed and overcome. But the major
difference betweenSorel on the one hand and Benjamin and Arendt on
the other lies in the rolethe role given to violence in creating
and shaping political agency in revol-ution. Benjamin and Arendt
both seek to reinforce a strict separation betweenthe violent
dispatch of the past and the nonviolent achievement of new
politi-cal possibilities. They envisage a violence which ends past
injustices whileleaving the beginning of something new open to
properly creative forces.
At its core, Arendts critique of Sorel and like-minded thinkers
instan-tiates though perhaps doesnt render sufficiently explicit a
distinction
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Finlay: Hannah Arendts Critique of Violence 43
between two kinds of instrumental justification: first, violence
justified as atactical-military instrument, meeting coercion with
coercion, and heading offforces that are directed in turn at the
negation of emerging political possi-bilities in revolution;
second, violence as an instrument directly shaping andacting within
the political possibilities themselves. For Sorel, violence wasseen
to have only limited value in the first sense. Its real utility was
seen inthe latter, animating politics by shaping the agents who
create it. It is in thissense, I take it, that Arendts idea of
instrumental justification can best bedistinguished from Sorels
approach and those others she attacked in OnViolence.
Christopher Finlay is a lecturer in political theory at the
University of Birming-ham. He is the author of Humes Social
Philosophy: Human Nature and CommercialSociability in a Treatise of
Human Nature (2007, Continuum) and various articles onthe history
of political thought and on violence and just war in political
theory. Hiscurrent work focuses on terrorism, ethics and political
language. [email: [email protected]]
AcknowledgementsFor reading drafts of this article and for their
comments, the author would like
to thank Stefan Auer, Patricia Owens, David Roberts and Avi
Tucker.
Notes1. Though Gandhis commitment to nonviolence was a good deal
more inflexible
than Michniks. Thanks to Stefan Auer for pointing this out to
me.2. See Conor Cruise OBrien in his Global Letter for further
examples of thinking
like this relating to the Provisional Irish Republican Army in
Northern Ireland(OBrien, 1978: 21).
3. For a systematic comparison of Arendts view in On Violence
with Fanon, seeFrazer and Hutchings (2008).
4. In this respect, it resembles the kind of inter-personal
relation that John Lockeidentified as a State of War in his Second
Treatise of Government (Simmons,1993: Ch. 1).
5. Of course, the differentiation between power and violence is
central toArendts discussion in On Violence, and this is reflected
in a similarly stipula-tive use of the terms Macht and Gewalt in
the German translation of thework (Arendt, 1970).
6. On which see Benjamins Thesis XII in the Theses on the
Philosophy ofHistory in which the properly Marxist and Spartacist
idea of the proletariat asthe avenger that completes the task of
liberation in the name of generationsof the downtrodden is
contrasted with the Social Democrat attempt to recon-figure it as
the redeemer of future generations (Benjamin, 1992: 2512).
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