The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

Abstract

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt's thought is well-documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt's analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay 'On Violence.' Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks' (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as 'fabrication' or 'work' here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth century context, rather than constituting a foundational 'rule' of political practice for Arendt. Arendt's portrayal of the Greek polis as a space which categorically excluded violence from the political sphere can be seen as either the root of these claims, or a key exemplar of the political, as it exists in its fullest form. 7 However, in her outline of the Roman understanding of the relationship between violence and politics, which is in certain respects diametrically opposed to the Greek conceptualisation, she is no less admiring, considering it, in fact, to be an important feature of the Romans' more pragmatic and sustainable politics. Thus, as this paper will seek to show, Arendt's work on Rome offers another way into understanding the relationship between violence and politics which enables an engagement between violence and the political. It focuses on the comparison between Greek and Roman politics as an example of how, in her depiction of political practice, a different realisation of the relationship between politics and violence emerges to the highly abstract conceptualisation offered in 'On Violence.' 8 But although this is just one example from Arendt's vast oeuvre, it is particularly illuminating on the question of how in reality violence and politics meet, and an example which forces us to reconsider Arendt's idea of violence in the political sphere in a broader sense. 4 This approach builds on the work of Patricia Owens, who has also convincingly written on the political relevance of war in Arendt's work on Rome. 9 She argues, in her 2009 work Between War and Politics, that whilst violence (here, warfare) is outside the realm of politics, it is constitutively exterior, that is, violent engagements may positively influence the political space of action. This study develops this line of argument further, drawing on Arendt's portrayal of th...

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