Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence

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Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence

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HANNAH ARENDT’SCRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE

Christopher J. Finlay

ABSTRACT This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violentmeans seen in Hannah Arendt’s writings. A central element in Arendt’s argumentagainst theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is thedistinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the‘legitimacy’ of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn’t really do the workArendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true distinctiveness of Arendt’sview 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. Arendt’s 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 whileArendt’s 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: 86–7; 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: 26–45SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op LtdDOI: 10.1177/0725513608101907



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 Arendtdoesn’t 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: 48–9, 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s polemic in 1969 is thedistinction she makes between instrumental justifications and approachesemphasizing the ‘legitimacy’ of violence or its intrinsic value. I argue thatthis doesn’t really do the work she needs it to in relation to rival theories.Part 3 examines one of Arendt’s 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. Arendt’s 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 betweenSorel’s thought and Arendt’s 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

Finlay: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Violence 27



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 élan vital of life itself, a view Arendt associatesparticularly with Sorel (Arendt, 1969: 66–8). 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 Fanon’s reflections on the Algerian war at times suggested (Fanon, 1967:46–8).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).

Arendt’s 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: ‘Power’which ‘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 with‘an 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

28 Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)



violence as valuable in and of itself, without reference either to origins orends, hence Arendt’s 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 violence’s sake’, Arendt (1969:65) writes (though Sartre’s 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 Arendt’s 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, inArendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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: 180–1). 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 Arendt’s complex thinking on the relationship between violent




instruments, justifying ends and politics (see Frazer and Hutchings, 2008:92–4). 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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 isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as good in itself.

So of what use is violence supposed to be, in Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s position was, in fact, much morecomplicated than reading On Violence on its own would seem to suggest. Ilook, therefore, in Part 3, at Sorel’s theory of revolutionary violence beforereconstructing Arendt’s broader philosophical view in Part 4 and then follow-ing through the comparison in Part 5.

3

Both Sorel’s view and Fanon’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s view. Showing where thethree authors are closest will allow me in subsequent sections to elucidatemore clearly the elements in Arendt’s more general approach towards revol-ution and violence that render it distinctive in a more decisive way. For thesake of space, I’ll limit detailed discussion to Sorel’s ideas and make briefercomparisons with Fanon inter alia.3

First of all, it’s necessary to point out intricacies in Sorel’s view thatArendt’s remarks seem to belie. In his Reflections on Violence (1999 [1908]),




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 Sorel’s approachtowards justification that goes beyond Arendt’s statement on glorification.Certainly Sorel’s 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 Sorel’s valorization of violenceis only seen in the second and third propositions.

On the face of it, the second proposition, that violence isn’t ‘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 doesn’t 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 ‘nonviolent’act 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 [one’s] 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]: 105–6). 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 Sorel’s 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: 183–4). 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




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: 48–52).Sorel’s 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.

Sorel’s ‘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 needn’t 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.




If Sorel’s 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. It’s not, therefore, entirely clearthat Arendt’s view as stated in On Violence excludes Sorel’s 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 subject’s agency by the unmediated violence of colonialism. But the utilityof violence isn’t primarily seen in its ability to overwhelm the armed forcesof colonial empire. Instead, it is a function of its therapeutic promise as theparticipation of empire’s 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 Fanon’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Sorel’s and Fanon’sthought, 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s 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 Arendt’saccount, 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




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.

Arendt’s 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. 159–61, 202; 1998).

The fundamental problem for modern revolutions, Arendt argued, wasthat of ‘beginning’, of establishing something genuinely new in historical time(Arendt, 1990: 27–9, 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: 155–61). 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: 205–6).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 Harrington’s 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: 139–40).




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 Abbé Sièyes was to introduce anessentially fictional distinction between the pouvoir constituant and thepouvoir constitué, 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: 162–4, 183).

The American narrative, in Arendt’s account, had disaggregated whatthe French mistakenly fused together. Centrally, it decoupled ‘revolution’from 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




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: 169–74).

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, 1990:187–9). 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: 151–4, 169–74).

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 Arendt’s neo-classical ideal of a non-instrumental politics in two senses: first, in the new polity’s 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




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 Arendt’s 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. Sorel’s 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, isn’t 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 – itdoesn’t 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.

Arendt’s 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,




whereas for Sorel and Fanon, politics and the instrumentality of violence areimmediately connected, Arendt’s view, as Owens has emphasized (Owens,2007: 25–31), 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 Paine’s 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, Arendt’s view can be seen as highly distinctive in relationto Sorel’s 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 Arendt’s and Sorel’s 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 Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Arendt’s textspermits a fuller exploration both of Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s writings on violence to Benjamin’s 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: 160–3, 166–8; Arendt, 1992). Moreover, atthe time of her death, Arendt was preparing for publication a second volume




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 Benjamin’s. I want tosuggest, first of all, that there are significant similarities in the concerns ofBenjamin’s and Arendt’s texts. Some of these, secondly, can in turn be tracedback to Sorel (whose influence is explicitly flagged in Benjamin’s text),marking, perhaps unexpectedly in light of Arendt’s On Violence, a positivelink between her thought and Sorel’s 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 Benjamin’s ‘Critique’ and Arendt’s 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 Agamben’s 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.




Both Benjamin and Arendt seek to envisage forms of violence, force, andpower (all possible translations of Benjamin’s 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 violence’of ‘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 ofGod’s 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 Benjamin’s 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 isn’t a beginning or an attempt to prolong a law; it is an ending only.

Arendt’s 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 Benjamin’s. 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 Benjamin’s account, we can add some further nuance to theinterpretation of Arendt’s 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 of‘pure 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 we’ve 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,




appears itself as a kind of ‘pure means’ in the sense that it isn’t 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 Arendt’s thought in this way casts light on importantcommon rather than divergent elements between her approach towardsrevolutionary violence and Sorel’s. 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]: 28–9).

Sorel’s reaction to this conception of politics and its appearance in theFrench Revolutionary Terror bears close resemblance to Arendt’s. 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]: 105–6). 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]: 125–6). For contemporary revolutionaries who sought to achieveemancipation through revolutionary action, therefore, it was crucial to by-passthe state. Thus Sorel’s ‘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]: 17–18).




Arendt’s 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.Arendt’s stylized narrative of the American Revolution presents in concretehistorical form an alternative vision of the revolutionary act to Sorel’s generalstrike (perhaps we should say an alternative ‘myth’; see Honig, 1993: 76, 96),one which re-establishes classical forms of political action rather than Sorel’ssocial ideal of industrial syndicalism. Equally, it postulates a possible escapefrom the fateful cycles of Benjamin’s ‘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, Arendt’s conception of politics as properly realized in a freedom thatescapes instrumental subordination to ends recalls Benjamin’s 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 Sorel’s 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 Arendt’s 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, Arendt’s critique of Sorel and like-minded thinkers instan-tiates – though perhaps doesn’t render sufficiently explicit – a distinction





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 Arendt’s idea of instrumental justification can best bedistinguished from Sorel’s 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 Hume’s 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 Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence was a good deal more inflexible

than Michnik’s. Thanks to Stefan Auer for pointing this out to me.2. See Conor Cruise O’Brien in his ‘Global Letter’ for further examples of thinking

like this relating to the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland(O’Brien, 1978: 21).

3. For a systematic comparison of Arendt’s 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 toArendt’s 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 Benjamin’s Thesis XII in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy ofHistory’ in which the properly Marxist and Spartacist idea of the proletariat as‘the 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: 251–2).

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Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence