Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence

Abstract

This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violent means seen in Hannah Arendt's writings. A central element in Arendt's argument against theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is the distinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the 'legitimacy' of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn't really do the work Arendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true distinctiveness of Arendt's view is seen when we turn to On Revolution and resituate the later arguments of On Violence in the context of her ideas about the separation between revolution and liberation. Arendt's commitment to the American discovery in revolutionary politics of a means that needs no further ends to justify it permits a rereading of her conception of liberation as an attempt to envisage a violence that, while tactically instrumental, is at the same time politically non-instrumental. But while Arendt's view is distinct, the article also highlights important thematic continuities 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)

An Arendtian geopolitics: Action, power and the deferral of work

“…We will clarify this point in the following sections according to a relationship Arendt (2009a [1958]) established between action and work. First, however, we consider another relationship, between means and ends, which is often ‘too uncertain…for violence to become a safe and reliable instrument in politics’ (Finlay, 2009: 29).…”

“…But too often ends are distant, utopian, their justness limited by the unpredictability of the means selected to achieve them. Means surpass ends; violence regularly ‘overwhelms its putative ends, undermining them, rendering them impossible’ (Finlay, 2009: 29; also Owens, 2007: 57). Further, geopolitics often connotes the tenuous strength of isolated leaders, which is supported and multiplied by the implements of violence (Arendt, 1970: 46).…”

The paradox of political violence

“… 6. Christopher Finlay (2009) makes a similar point, although his article focuses more so on the manner in which Arendt’s thought is closer to Sorel’s thought on violence, power, and politics than she would have us believe in On Violence . …”

“… 2. For a comprehensive overview of Arendt’s qualifications on her instrumental view of violence, see Finlay (2009: 29–30). Despite these qualifications, and despite the fact that Arendt is certainly not an instrumentalist thinker per se, her (re)conceptualization of violence, at least after the 1940s (see Birmingham, 2011: 12), remains instrumental. …”

Hannah Arendt, violence and vitality

“…This article does not propose a systematic account of Hannah Arendt’s theory of violence, which is elaborated most clearly in her 1969 essay, On Violence , but that is foundational to her political thought as a whole. Several detailed studies of Arendt’s treatment of violence, and of her relation to precursor and contemporary theorists of violence including Clausewitz, Marx and Engels, Sorel, Benjamin, Fanon and Sartre have appeared in recent years (Hanssen, 2000; Frazer and Hutchins, 2008; Finlay, 2009). Arendt’s difference from other theorists of violence is found in her fundamentally phenomenological effort to disentangle violence from power; and the problem of her theory is often seen to lie in the limits of her normative claims for a politics cleansed of violence.…”