HANNAH ARENDT’S
CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE
Christopher J. Finlay
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)
What is the use of violence in revolution? For the intellectual leaders
of 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 build
new Bastilles (Michnik, 1985: 86–7; Auer, 2004).1 The thought here, then, is
that the choice of means limits, conditions and shapes the possible ends of
revolution. A politics that emerges from violent revolution will therefore bear
the imprint of the violence that facilitated its birth. If revolution aims at the
Thesis Eleven, Number 97, May 2009: 26–45
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513608101907
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Finlay: Hannah Arendt’s Critique of Violence
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establishment of a sphere of democratic freedom liberated from the coercive
structures of oppression, it must make a decisive break with coercion from
the beginning.
Although her thoughts on the essentially nonviolent nature of political
power helped in some way to shape the approach to revolution in 1989 as
well as towards its interpretation since (Schell, 2005: 217), Hannah Arendt
doesn’t seem to have shared the view that violence is completely without
possible utility in contexts of political action, revolutionary ones in particular. Her response to the global turbulence of 1968, admittedly, presents a
pessimistic view on the likelihood that violence could promote a political
cause. Some of the most striking passages in On Violence (1969) highlight
the fact that a stand-off between democratic solidarity and a state that has
lost its power but not its capacity to coerce will typically see the victory of
the forces of reaction (Arendt, 1969: 48–9, 53). But even in her most sceptical writings, Arendt maintained that violence could sometimes be justified
as the means for achieving just ends, ends which were important for politics.
My aim in this article is to interrogate the idea of instrumental justification 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 overview
of her various critical remarks on the instrumental potential of violence in
relation to politics. A central element in Arendt’s polemic in 1969 is the
distinction she makes between instrumental justifications and approaches
emphasizing the ‘legitimacy’ of violence or its intrinsic value. I argue that
this 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 argue
that the concept of instrumentality as it appears in On Violence fails to
exclude on its own the justifications for violence he presented. I then turn
in Part 4 to earlier writings by Arendt, centrally her work on the American
Revolution in On Revolution (1990 [1963, revised 1965]), to resituate the later
arguments in the context of her ideas about the separations between politics
and violence, and revolution and liberation. Arendt’s commitment to the
American rediscovery in politics of a means that needs no further ends to
justify it permits a rereading of her conception of revolution as an attempt
to envisage a violence that while tactically instrumental is at the same time
politically non-instrumental. In Part 5 I return to the relationship between
Sorel’s thought and Arendt’s thinking in On Revolution and On Violence taken
as a whole by considering the importance of Walter Benjamin as an intermediate figure.
2
Through her reflections on violence during the late 1960s – and centrally
in her short polemical work On Violence published in 1969 – Arendt engaged
in debate with a range of different theorists and their followers and, through
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Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
them, a number of distinct but interconnected theoretical propositions. The
theoretical propositions were fourfold: first, that violence is a central part of
the political, identical with or essential to power; secondly, that violence is
or should be treated as valuable in and of itself; thirdly, that violence is an
inescapable and persistent element of human and especially political life,
rooted in or analogous to biological necessity; and, finally, that the permissibility of violence relates to its origins as distinct from its ends. These themes
are interconnected in the sense that they can be combined in various ways
to form more complex arguments. Thus, if human life is a struggle at core
and violence a necessary part of the struggle, and if life itself is valorized as
a creative principle, then violence can be glorified and seen as intrinsically
good since it expresses the élan vital of life itself, a view Arendt associates
particularly with Sorel (Arendt, 1969: 66–8). Similarly, if the psychically or
physiologically necessary consequence of violent oppression and exploitation
is counter-violence by colonial subjects, then the justice of that violence could
be 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 blind
necessity and legitimacy as an index of original, subjective provenance could
be seen in strands of Marxist thought, though, as Arendt emphasized, Marx
himself had said little to indicate that he saw violence as essential to revolutionary change (Arendt, 1969: 11; Finlay, 2006).
Arendt’s engagement with these themes formed one of the contexts
within which she made her pronouncements on the need to justify violence
instrumentally. In moral terms, violence, Arendt writes, ‘can be justifiable,
but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses in plausibility the farther
its intended end recedes into the future’ (Arendt, 1969: 52). Similarly, the
rationality of violence is determined by its conduciveness to achieving just
ends: ‘Violence, being instrumental by nature’, she writes, ‘is rational to the
extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it. And since
when we act we never know with any certainty the eventual consequences
of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues shortterm goals’ (Arendt, 1969: 79).
As the correct criterion for justification, Arendt contrasts instrumentality with two principles invoked erroneously in revolutionary literature. First,
‘legitimacy’ theories falsely invoke the subjective origins of violence as vindication of its justice. For Arendt, legitimacy is something that properly belongs
to power and the solidarities through which it appears in the world: ‘Power’
which ‘springs up whenever people get together and act in concert . . . derives
its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that
then 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 violent
instrument seeks validation from ‘an end that lies in the future’, i.e. what
Arendt calls ‘justification’ (Arendt, 1969: 52). The second error is to treat
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29
violence as valuable in and of itself, without reference either to origins or
ends, hence Arendt’s remark in the introduction to On Revolution:
A theory of war or a theory of revolution . . . can only deal with the justification
of violence because the justification constitutes its political limitation; if, instead,
it arrives at a glorification or justification of violence as such, it is no longer
political but antipolitical. (Arendt, 1990: 19)
Instrumental justification thus appears as a key criterion for Arendt in
distinguishing her account of permissible violence from the theories of Sorel,
Fanon and others. Along with Vilfredo Pareto, Sorel and Fanon are among
the few theorists who ‘glorified violence for violence’s sake’, Arendt (1969:
65) writes (though Sartre’s idea that violence can be recreative of the human
being is included in the sweep of this argument). And legitimacy and
necessity contributed to the arguments through which their valorization of
violence as good in itself was promoted (Arendt, 1969; Finlay, 2006).
There are, however, some important qualifications to Arendt’s endorsement of instrumental justifications in On Violence. First of all, while justification is to be preferred to approaches emphasizing ‘legitimacy’, Arendt is
emphatic that the relationship between means and ends is too uncertain in
important respects for violence to become a safe and reliable instrument in
politics. There are two difficulties: first, violence is inherently arbitrary and
unpredictable in its results as some of the statements quoted above emphasize. Even without the means of violence, action in general is unpredictable.
But while uncoerced and non-coercive political action is a good in itself, in
Arendt’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 puts
it. Far from slavishly pursuing the ends in whose services it has been enlisted,
violence tends to overwhelm its putative ends, undermining them, rendering
them impossible, or displacing them by creating conditions giving rise to new
ends (Arendt, 1969: 10, 54; Owens, 2007: 57). From both problems Arendt
concludes that the most likely result of using violence is that it will lead to
more violence (Arendt, 1969: 80).
Finally, perhaps the most significant qualification to Arendt’s view arises
from the tension she perceived between two opposing moral possibilities:
action, on the one hand, as the means of revealing the self in the visible
world circumscribed by public-political space; and violence, on the other,
as an instrumentalization which diminishes the capacity of both persons and
language to achieve self-disclosure (Arendt, 1998: 180–1). Considered from
this point of view, violence is inimical to politics, a point which Arendt drives
home with great vehemence throughout On Violence but which forms a continuous theme in her published work. It suggests that the idea that justification stands as a ‘political limitation’, ambiguous in the passage quoted above,
is crucial to Arendt’s complex thinking on the relationship between violent
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instruments, justifying ends and politics (see Frazer and Hutchings, 2008:
92–4). For Arendt, the material barriers by which the Greek polis marked the
line between political life, animated by speech and action, and the interpolitical realm (the space between one polis and another), in which mute
force was the typical element, retained vital symbolic significance in her neoclassical critique of contemporary political thought.
These few comments underline thematic concerns and principles central
to Arendt’s philosophical position on violence and the political: violence can
be justified by ends which relate to politics; the relationship between justification and politics marks a ‘limitation’, which points towards Arendt’s reluctance to regard violence as something which can occur within politics; the
justification of violence dissipates with extension in time and space, and so
with an eye on historical experience even instrumental justifications are to
be regarded sceptically; the justice of violence has nothing to do with its
origins; 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? What
instrumental goals can it be expected to serve and how? And how do these
relate to politics? I want to try and shed some light on these questions not
simply by examining Arendt’s writings alone, but by examining the thoughts
of some of those whom she regarded as theoretical adversaries and then
trying to clarify the differences between her position and theirs. Looking at
Sorel in particular will show how Arendt’s position was, in fact, much more
complicated than reading On Violence on its own would seem to suggest. I
look, therefore, in Part 3, at Sorel’s theory of revolutionary violence before
reconstructing Arendt’s broader philosophical view in Part 4 and then following through the comparison in Part 5.
3
Both Sorel’s view and Fanon’s were influential examples, Arendt maintained, of the tendency to glorify violence for its own sake and both were
guilty of introducing the elements of legitimacy and necessity as parts of
their more general approach to the justice of political violence (Arendt, 1990:
65). I will argue, however, that the positions they presented were less vulnerable to the line of argument taken in On Violence than Arendt’s fairly abrupt
dismissal seems to suggest. Both authors add to their legitimist and determinist lines of justification a further, instrumentalist line which, at least at
first glance, seems to be consistent with Arendt’s view. Showing where the
three authors are closest will allow me in subsequent sections to elucidate
more clearly the elements in Arendt’s more general approach towards revolution and violence that render it distinctive in a more decisive way. For the
sake of space, I’ll limit detailed discussion to Sorel’s ideas and make briefer
comparisons with Fanon inter alia.3
First of all, it’s necessary to point out intricacies in Sorel’s view that
Arendt’s 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 manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears . . . as a very fine and
heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization’.
While it is ‘not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages,’ he adds, ‘it may save the world from barbarism’
(Sorel, 1999 [1908]: 85). This passage reflects a complexity in Sorel’s approach
towards justification that goes beyond Arendt’s statement on glorification.
Certainly Sorel’s first remark reflects a view on the glory of revolutionary
violence underwritten by the legitimacy of its origins in proletarian revolutionary consciousness. But the full sense of Sorel’s valorization of violence
is only seen in the second and third propositions.
On the face of it, the second proposition, that violence isn’t ‘the most
appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages’, appears to
reject instrumentalist justifications for the use of violence and there is some
truth to this view. Although Arendt describes him as thinking about class
struggle ‘in military terms’ (Arendt, 1969: 12), Sorel thought that the kind of
coercive violence seen in war had little or no role to play in revolution. At
times he does compare class warfare to conventional military force, but Sorel
regarded the practice of violence in class war in a very different light from
the Clausewitzian view on military engagement. Carl von Clausewitz captures
the essence of war in the images of duelists and wrestlers. Each belligerent
applies force to his opponent to try and break his will and one succeeds
when the other bows to his wishes (Clausewitz, 1993: 83). Sorel doesn’t treat
personal violence as an instrument for wresting concessions from an opponent
as Clausewitz does. Where the final tactical confrontation of revolution eventually occurs, it is in what Arendt recognized as the essentially ‘nonviolent’
act of the proletarian general strike (Arendt, 1969: 12; see also Frazer and
Hutchings, this issue). Thus, what for Clausewitz is the aim of military
violence, to ‘throw [one’s] opponent in order to make him incapable of further
resistance’, 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 force
against the opponents of revolution, but in its capacity to provoke and inspire
and to ‘mark the separation of classes’ (Sorel, 1999 [1908]: 105–6). By these
means it could shape the emergence of polarizing forces in society and thus
help to bring about a general strike through which one force would finally
succumb 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] it
may save the world from barbarism’. Civilization was under threat from a
barbarous 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 instrumental one (Frazer and Hutchings, 2007: 183–4). Though its purpose is not
to defeat the armed forces of a state in fixed battle, it is instrumental in
radicalizing 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 century
the fear that genuine revolutionary liberation could be prevented by a ruling
class willing to gild the chains of oppression, perpetuating the dominant
order by making it as comfortable as possible for those in whose interests
it 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 ruling
elements into forceful repression and compelling the bourgeoisie to play its
historic role in the unfolding drama of capitalist hubris in full. The violence
of repression and renewed exploitation would in turn reinforce the consciousness of the proletariat, consolidating it around a clear interest, inimical to the
status quo, and purifying it of the last vestiges of attachment to bourgeois
culture and science.
Sorel’s ‘glorification of violence’ occurs in the context of his wider strategic approach to revolutionary escalation and confrontation, comprising, in
effect, a second element to follow the use of violence in provocation. Again,
in this second moment the utility of violence is something different from
Clausewitzian tactical force. Glorification occurs instead in the context of a
theatrical approach to violence. To achieve the will to act, to destroy as
thoroughly as possible the old order, and to create the new, the revolutionaries, Sorel argued, must be animated by a myth. The myth would constitute
a narrative through which the proletariat could imagine, orientate and motivate itself in a historic struggle with its enemies. Violent actions against the
forces of order would engender the myth of a cataclysmic struggle between
two great, elemental life forces, inspiring those who saw it or heard its story
told with the idea of imitating and following it. The energy this myth generated would in turn feed the real moment of tactical force, the proletarian strike
which dealt the final crippling blow to the bourgeois order, killing capitalist
society and its state apparatus in a single moment (Sorel, 1999 [1908]).
For Sorel, therefore, the occurrence of personal violence needn’t be
widespread or even, necessarily, successful from a tactical point of view. Its
utility – its availability as an instrument in revolutionary politics – arises from
the possibility that it can be acted out and dramatized theatrically, contributing to the construction of a narrative – the myth of the general strike – into
which the proletarian can insert himself in fantasy and, eventually, in action.
Violence contributes to myth and feeds the passions it engenders through
glorification and the myth both precipitates the fall of the old order and
shapes the political consciousness through which the new is built. Violence,
however, is not glorified ‘for its own sake’, as Arendt thought. Its glorification occurs because to heroize violence is useful as part of a political strategy
for revolution. Thus while violence lacks an immediate justification as a
tactical-military instrument, it is given an instrumental justification mediated
through political strategy.
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If Sorel’s Reflections on Violence do tend to glorify violence, they do
so in a way that might appear justified by the political ends that theatrical
violence can potentially help bring about. It’s not, therefore, entirely clear
that Arendt’s view as stated in On Violence excludes Sorel’s revolutionary
violence from its permissive reach. This is arguably true for Fanon too. In
The Wretched of the Earth, violence is the only antidote to the crushing of
the subject’s agency by the unmediated violence of colonialism. But the utility
of violence isn’t primarily seen in its ability to overwhelm the armed forces
of colonial empire. Instead, it is a function of its therapeutic promise as the
participation of empire’s victims in counter-violence helps them to claim back
their 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 least
as much as the tactical effectiveness of violence in real battle that effects a
change in the political situation. But it is the effect of change, among other
things, that gives justification to bloodshed: as with Sorel, the violence reflected
in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth may be justified at least in part by instrumentality (Fanon, 1967).
Both Sorel and Fanon invoke legitimacy and necessity in Arendt’s sense
in relation to the justification of violence. For both, the emergence of an
authentic, revolutionary form of subjectivity is essential to validating revolutionary actions in general, both those constitutive of the new order and
those destructive of the old. Similarly, both present accounts of the aetiology
of violence in which it may be seen as an inescapable part of the human
condition. But notwithstanding these dimensions of Sorel’s and Fanon’s
thought, both theorists also account for the justice of revolutionary violence
partly in reference to its usefulness in achieving political goals. Both, therefore, may be defensible in relation to Arendt’s argument that the justice or
rationality of violence is principally a function of its instrumental utility. As
things stand, therefore, the polemical attack she directed against them in the
late 1960s seems to leave open the possibility of a partial vindication of both
theorists. I turn, therefore, to Arendt’s earlier and more elaborate discussions
of the role of violence in revolution to seek a clearer view on what may be
seen as differentiating her position from those of her intellectual rivals.
4
To distinguish Arendt’s view from those of Sorel and Fanon, it is necessary to turn to the matter of how the goals that can justify violence, in Arendt’s
account, relate to politics. How can Arendt at once insist that violence be
justified 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 politically
justified violence or even of political violence as such? In which case, what
ends can justify violence and how do these ends relate to political ends? In
the context of revolution, and especially, for Arendt, the American Revolution
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Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
where violence is historically an inescapable fact (Andress, 2005: 2), this will
be a question of how violence is supposed to serve the revolution without
being seen to serve political ends as such and thus to enter the non-violent
spaces and actions of politics proper.
Arendt’s analysis of the relationships between violence and revolution
follows the ontological categories traced in The Human Condition, categories
she thought had been confused and short-circuited in the traditions of
modern revolution that emerged after 1789. Moreover, the collapse of ontological categories into one another, of acting into making and of politics into
fabrication, appeared, in her analysis, as the result of aberrant developments
in European history – in thought, action and institutional practice – traceable back to the last days of the Roman Empire. The Americans escaped the
logic of Western, post-Roman political concepts in actions that had strayed
fortuitously 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, was
that of ‘beginning’, of establishing something genuinely new in historical time
(Arendt, 1990: 27–9, 34, 213). This arose only through the historical experience of the modern era, discovered by the revolutionaries of the late 18th
century in the course of the revolutions themselves, but not intended as a
political goal (Arendt, 1990: 29). With this new experience came the attendant problems of conceptualizing and stabilizing the new beginning in lasting
laws and institutions. Arendt uses a comparison of the two revolutions to
specify, on the one hand, the dangers of admitting violence into politics at
the moment of revolutionary beginning, and, on the other, the limits which
revolutions must respect if they are to avoid the catastrophes of revolutionary Terror and the stillbirth of the new political order.
The task of founding and stabilizing a new beginning was vitiated
entirely for the French, partly as a result of the conceptual-pragmatic legacies
of the medieval Christian order and early-modern absolutism, its offspring
(Arendt, 1990: 155–61). The French Revolution fell into the characteristically
post-Roman idea that new beginnings in secular history could occur only
with the intervention of a ‘maker’. In the Judaeo-Christian conception of
historical time, the problem of beginning is solved with reference to a Creator
who exists outside the temporal stream of his creation (Arendt, 1990: 205–6).
With the collapse of the Old Regime, the French encountered the problem
of beginning in the historical present. Their solution took a similar form as
they drew on James Harrington’s non-Roman assumption that ‘the means of
violence which indeed are ordinary and necessary for all purposes of fabrication’ are needed in the establishment of a new or the renovation of an old
constitution. This is so ‘precisely because something is created, not out of
nothing, but out of given material which must be violated in order to yield
itself to the formative processes out of which a thing, a fabricated object,
will arise’ (Arendt, 1990: 208; 1998: 139–40).
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The idea of political beginning as fabrication invoked a conceptual
foundation for the kinds of instrumentalism that Arendt rejected in politics.
Its results were seen in the attempt to master both the ‘social problem’ of
poverty and the political problem of constituting power and legality by
means of the coercive instruments of government. By this category mistake,
Arendt argued, action was crowded out by concepts of production, and it
was this that drew violence into the vortex of revolutionary politics, as the
revolutionary legislator was cast in the role of constitutional manufacturer
and the politician in that of a social engineer.
The fundamental difference between the revolutions in America and
France was seen in how each addressed the matter of founding a new political and legal order. For the French, this presented itself as a single, unitary
problem. Both legality and power were to be established simultaneously.
The problem of foundation raised in turn the question of legitimacy, i.e. of
achieving an external authority upon which to ground both. The influential
but ultimately unsuccessful solution of the Abbé Sièyes was to introduce an
essentially fictional distinction between the pouvoir constituant and the
pouvoir constitué, the latter deriving authority from the former. Its practical
result was the deification of the people, the very agent that would undermine the foundations of the new polity and bring a flood of violence into
revolutionary politics (Arendt, 1990: 162–4, 183).
The American narrative, in Arendt’s account, had disaggregated what
the French mistakenly fused together. Centrally, it decoupled ‘revolution’
from the acts of ‘liberation’ that accompanied it, enabling Arendt to trace a
line dividing politics proper and the foundation of freedom from war and
violence more generally (Arendt, 1990: 142, 299). Whereas the foundation
of a new power in France occurred simultaneously with the constitution of
a new legal order, the foundations of power in America had been laid already
in the period prior to the outbreak of violence in the 1770s. At least symbolically, the divergence of American practice from the European, post-Roman
thought occurred as early as the Mayflower compact. Unwittingly, the settlers
who bound themselves together through mutual promises while crossing the
Atlantic on their way to the New World instantiated an alternative mode by
which power could constitute itself and, hence, a new way to begin politically. Arendt distinguished this kind of compact between equals from those
social contracts that theorists imagine between individuals and governments.
Where individuals are supposed to bind themselves in a single act to a
durable government, a real sacrifice is made as the subject hands over certain
native rights to the ruler. And where governments are authorized to act even
against the wishes of those who originally created them, an external authority is therefore needed to validate and guarantee the deal, one before whom
both parties to the contract make their pledge. By contrast, individuals
engaging in mutual promises – like the American covenanters – need no
external source of authority or enforcement. They engage in the covenant
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Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
in full mutual visibility, each only gaining and none alienating any power
that pre-existed their agreement. Power instead emerges from the compact
where none existed before, a solidaristic power – the kind Arendt outlines
again in On Violence – that needed no coercion or instruments of violence
and 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, the
American settlers had discovered ways to found power without replicating
the relation of rule and its coercive demands. For the Americans, the story
of the Mayflower compact which first instantiated the constitutive power of
promising continued with the multiplication of ‘powers’ that emerged at all
levels in American society while under British sovereignty. And in the context
of constitution-building later on, the notion of mutual agreement marked a
reappearance of the originally Roman idea of law as the agreement between
two parties rather than the relation between rulers and ruled (Arendt, 1990:
187–9). When the Founding Fathers came to create a constitution for the
United States, crucially they sought to draw these smaller powers into the
greater federative power of the new political entity instead of displacing them
with a new sovereign monopoly at the centre. They thus avoided creating
a vacuum of the kind seen in France during the 1790s. And by drawing on
power that came from non-coercive mutual promising, they kept open a
public space for political action purified of the violent instrumentalities that
would repeatedly tear the French polity apart (Arendt, 1990: 151–4, 169–74).
The American narrative thus provided Arendt with a critical counterpoint
to the French experience. Its ‘great insights’ concerning the constitutive act
of beginning were seen in its ‘flagrant opposition to the age-old and still
current notions of the dictating violence, necessary for all revolutions and
hence supposedly unavoidable in all revolutions’ (Arendt, 1990: 213). The
American Revolution instantiated Arendt’s neo-classical ideal of a noninstrumental politics in two senses: first, in the new polity’s own selfconstitution violence was absent and unnecessary from the start, a start which
predated the War of Independence; secondly, having eliminated violence
from the constitutive act, it was eliminated from the spaces created by that
act. 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, saves
everything.’ Just as a violent act of foundation would create institutions
pervaded by violence, so a nonviolent initiation could establish the principle
of a politics purified of violent means for posterity (Arendt, 1990: 213).
So if violence is – and ought to be – excluded from the acts of political foundation and legal self-constitution, then what role does it actually play
in this story? The answer is in the context of ‘liberation’, which Arendt distinguishes from ‘revolution’ properly speaking. Whereas revolution is identified
with the beginning of a new order, liberation occurs with the end of an old
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37
one. Whatever the precise sequence of events in historical time, revolution
is the process through which a new beginning is made, first and foremost
through the creation of solidaristic power. As such, it is a process which has
only a contingent and indirect relationship with violence, if violence occurs
at all. Violence, where it does occur, is the act through which powers such
as those already established in America or powers that are only beginning to
emerge elsewhere – like the workers’ Soviets in Russia in 1917 – defend the
spaces they have opened up for non-violent, political action from the forces
trying to suppress or destroy them. Violence is thus justified as the means of
defence and it is instrumental in serving the preservation of solidarities
created through otherwise non-violent interaction.
Violence is thus something whose instrumentality occurs outside the
political solidarity. It is used not between participants as rulers against ruled,
but between those inside the civil compact and those outside who come to
threaten them and the power they have made.4 Hence violence is justified
as a direct tactical instrument that serves justifying ends that are political in
one sense, but without entering the public space which is the proper domain
of politics (for a similar point, see Frazer and Hutchings, 2008: 92). Violence
may be political, therefore, not in the sense that it serves political ends, but
in the sense that it serves politics as such, i.e. the possibility of creating and
pursuing 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 justification as such as in their differing construal of the means-end relation. The
difference is twofold, relating both to the question of which ends can provide
justification for violence and that of how they do so. Sorel’s instrumental
justification presents violence in a productive role, shaping political consciousness and hence the political orders that consciousness is capable of generating. The justification for physical force between one person and another,
on this account, is mediated through the effects that the action is likely to
have on various third parties and their subsequent political interactions. The
justifying end, therefore, isn’t the immediate tactical-military one of defeating
the person against whom force is used, but a political, mediated one. By
provoking confrontation and shaping political consciousness, violence in a
sense serves political ends directly; but by the same means, it serves the
tactical ends of defeating an enemy only indirectly. While the immediate
opponent in the physical act of violence may or may not be defeated – it
doesn’t matter for Sorel – the political consequences of the act will lead ultimately to a (non-violent) confrontation in the general strike which brings
about final and complete tactical victory for the revolutionaries.
Arendt’s view, by contrast, sees violence as justified only by the direct
military-tactical or strategic aim of defeating an enemy, someone presenting
physical obstacles or threats. Political goals as such provide only indirect
justification, if they can truly be said to provide justification at all. Thus,
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38
Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
whereas for Sorel and Fanon, politics and the instrumentality of violence are
immediately connected, Arendt’s view, as Owens has emphasized (Owens,
2007: 25–31), is structured around a strict distinction and separation between
military tactics and strategy on the one hand and politics on the other. For
Arendt, justified violence corresponds not to political revolution as such but
to war and (wars of) ‘liberation’. Her view of the instrumental effectiveness
of violence in the context of liberation follows the Clausewitzian understanding of war as an encounter with the coercive strength of an enemy, in which
counter-force is deployed with the aim of neutralizing it directly and overwhelming it. This kind of military violence has the purely negative usefulness of helping to eliminate external threats. By contrast, all the positive
political acts through which revolutionary movements, emerging powers, and
legal and political constitution occur are part of a discrete process, perhaps
facilitated negatively and indirectly by violence, but themselves consisting
only of the nonviolent elements of action and speech. The most dangerous
philosophical views, from this perspective, were those which short-circuit
the distinction as Sorel and Fanon did between military strategy and political self-constitution. (Arendt uses the word ‘constitution’ in Paine’s sense: ‘A
constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a
government.’) It was by envisaging forms of violence whose instrumental
potential was seen in terms not of military but of political strategy, mediated
through theatricality rather than justified by immediate tactical effectiveness,
that thinkers such as Sorel and Fanon threatened to reproduce the errors of
the French Revolution.
5
Crucially, then, Arendt’s view can be seen as highly distinctive in relation
to Sorel’s and the difference in approach between the two theorists does
hinge in important respects on the question of instrumental justification.
Before concluding this article, however, I want to suggest some other ways
in which Arendt’s and Sorel’s views are more closely connected and even
similar than is usually supposed. To see these, it is necessary to bring into
discussion the intermediate figure of Walter Benjamin. Highlighting important resonances between Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Arendt’s texts
permits a fuller exploration both of Arendt’s intellectual relationship with Sorel
and of her critique of violent means and political ends.
As Beatrice Hanssen remarks, there is a ‘conspicuous’ absence of any
reference in Arendt’s writings on violence to Benjamin’s influential ‘Critique’
(Hanssen, 2000: 16), a text which registers strongly the influence of Sorel
and which addresses key themes common to both Sorel and Arendt. Arendt
knew Benjamin personally and was intimately acquainted with at least some
of his work (Young-Bruehl, 2004: 160–3, 166–8; Arendt, 1992). Moreover, at
the time of her death, Arendt was preparing for publication a second volume
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39
of selected pieces by Benjamin that was to include the ‘Critique’ itself. There
is therefore more than a purely speculative basis for making comparisons
between her thoughts on revolutionary violence and Benjamin’s. I want to
suggest, first of all, that there are significant similarities in the concerns of
Benjamin’s and Arendt’s texts. Some of these, secondly, can in turn be traced
back to Sorel (whose influence is explicitly flagged in Benjamin’s text),
marking, perhaps unexpectedly in light of Arendt’s On Violence, a positive
link between her thought and Sorel’s syndicalist appropriation of Marxism.
Central to these concerns are the relationships between political ends and
violent means, i.e. the basic terms constitutive of instrumental justification.
There is, to begin with, an important general similarity in the nature
of those concerns animating Benjamin’s ‘Critique’ and Arendt’s works on
revolution and violence: both seek a way to envisage a revolutionary political beginning capable of resisting the ‘fateful’ cycles of violence seen in the
past, i.e. a revolution that marks a beginning precisely in the sense that it
escapes these cycles. Like Arendt, Benjamin conceptualizes the problem of
violence as one centrally requiring critical interrogation of the relationship
between means and ends, first of all, and secondly, as a challenge to legalpositivist accounts of the legitimacy of violent means considered independently of just ends. Also like Arendt, Benjamin sketches out the conceptual
basis for a critique of European history in which violence and law have
become entangled in a seemingly inescapable constellation which threatens
to efface any possibility of a politics in which true and non-coercive forms of
human flourishing can be realized. Finally, both philosophers try to envisage
a means to begin anew that can break through the historical continuum in a
moment of force that occurs in such a way as to avoid violent relationships
re-entering the new era, corrupting it and dragging it back into the old fateful
cycle. Both seek, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, ‘a dissolution of the link
between violence and the law’ (Agamben, 1998: 31; Polsky, 2005: 79).
For Benjamin, means and ends are related in problematic ways, either
in the form of ‘law-making violence’ or ‘law-preserving’ violence. In the
former, violence posits ends that will be embodied in law; in the latter, it
secures the laws through coercion and the punishment of a guilt that violence
itself created in the first place: ‘the function of violence in lawmaking is
twofold,’ 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 not
dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under the title of power. (Benjamin, 1996: 248)
This fateful interpenetration of violent means and legal ends appears in
Arendt in the twofold evil of a doctrine that sees revolutionary violence as a
creative force and coercive rule as a norm of political life.
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40
Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
Both Benjamin and Arendt seek to envisage forms of violence, force, and
power (all possible translations of Benjamin’s Gewalt) that can, so to speak,
violently break the fateful cycle of law-making and law-preserving violence
without 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 a
new law and with it a new guilt (Benjamin, 1996: 252). The Hebrew story of
God’s sudden and final destruction of the company of the Korah provides
his illustration, contrasting with the mythical story of Niobe who is left behind
having been punished through the death of her children. In both cases, there
are 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 the
living ‘both as an eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone on
the frontier between men and gods’ (Benjamin, 1996: 248). Law itself is almost
literally written in blood. For the Israelites, by contrast, the Divine violence
inscribes no new law. In Benjamin’s account, it merely annihilates something
old: as Giorgio Agamben puts it, ‘[t]he proper characteristic of this violence
is 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 merely
negative moment of casting off the legal-coercive structures of the past order
reflects a similar idea to Benjamin’s. In destroying the old law in its complicit
relationship with violence, truly liberating violence makes way for a new kind
of non-coercive order that is beginning or has already begun within. For
Arendt, like Benjamin, violence becomes problematic and threatens to vitiate
any 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 posit
new 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 and
refuse to stand down, then violence may do its work (if, that is, it has
sufficient strength to defeat them). Its action is purely negative and immediate: its purpose is to annihilate, not to discipline.6
In light of Benjamin’s account, we can add some further nuance to the
interpretation of Arendt’s instrumentalism. Benjamin rejects both natural law
and positivist couplings of violent means with justified and justifying ends.
Through his philosophy of history, he tries to see beyond the positivist
attempt to tie legal ends, justified by history, with the means – coercive institutions – 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 of
liberation are not linked positively to political ends as such, as we’ve seen; to
the extent that they serve anything approximating to an ‘end’, they serve the
purely negative purposes of preventing destructive forces from eliminating
a 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 isn’t connected
to ends that will draw it back into the coercive cycles of fate. By the same
token, the action which occurs within the political space can also appear as
a ‘pure means’ inasmuch as it needs no guidance by ends beyond itself for
justification or rationality (Arendt, 1990: 33; Habermas, 1979: 55).
Characterizing Arendt’s thought in this way casts light on important
common rather than divergent elements between her approach towards
revolutionary violence and Sorel’s. For Sorel, as for Benjamin and Arendt,
the problem of revolutionary violence is one of envisaging a moment of force
that could disable and dismantle the old without reintroducing a corrupting
element into the new. And as with Arendt particularly, it is the figure of the
Jacobin who embodies the great warning from history of what can happen
if revolutionaries think about their actions in the wrong way. For Sorel, the
most dangerous contemporary fallacy – prevalent among parliamentary socialists – was the notion that the state could be used as an instrument for bringing
about social progress. By attempting to harness its irreducibly coercive mechanisms, revolutionaries acting through the state inevitably inclined towards
Terror (Sorel, 1999 [1908]: 28–9).
Sorel’s reaction to this conception of politics and its appearance in the
French Revolutionary Terror bears close resemblance to Arendt’s. For Sorel,
any attempt to use policy to impose change, however well-meaning, carries
the threat of a renewed Jacobinism: ‘if, by chance, our parliamentary socialists come to power,’ he predicts, ‘they will prove themselves worthy successors of the Inquisition, of the ancien regime and of Robespierre.’ Utopian
ameliorism, he thought, was irredeemably terrorist due to the coercive nature
of the instrument it deployed. Any attempt, consequently, to take over government would corrupt the revolution, steering it towards terror, as its ends would
be irrecoverably conditioned by the means chosen to try and achieve them.
He condemns, therefore, ‘those who teach the people that they ought to carry
out we know not what highly idealistic decrees of a progressive justice. They
work to maintain those ideas about the State which provoked the bloody acts
of ‘93’ (Sorel, 1999 [1908]: 105–6). As a self-styled pessimist, Sorel argued
that only catastrophe offered hope for change that could offer true chances
for 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 achieve
emancipation through revolutionary action, therefore, it was crucial to by-pass
the state. Thus Sorel’s ‘Proletarian violence’, by contrast with contemporary
socialism and in common with the forms of force envisaged both by Benjamin
and Arendt, was intended to break irrevocably with legal coercion and the
law. It would change entirely ‘the appearance of all the conflicts in which it
plays a part, since it disowns the force organized by the bourgeoisie and
wants to suppress the State which serves as its central nucleus’ (Sorel, 1999
[1908]: 17–18).
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42
Thesis Eleven (Number 97 2009)
Arendt’s critique of revolutionary violence can therefore be seen as an
attempt to address a problematic with which both Sorel and Benjamin had
earlier engaged, viz. how to envisage a true revolutionary break in historical time through which new political spaces could open, freed from force.
Arendt’s stylized narrative of the American Revolution presents in concrete
historical form an alternative vision of the revolutionary act to Sorel’s general
strike (perhaps we should say an alternative ‘myth’; see Honig, 1993: 76, 96),
one which re-establishes classical forms of political action rather than Sorel’s
social ideal of industrial syndicalism. Equally, it postulates a possible escape
from the fateful cycles of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in which violence
continually establishes, conserves or replaces a seemingly endless sequence
of political orders, each proving just as coercive as the last. But while for
Benjamin the escape from cyclical-historical time occurs with the rupture
made by a ‘Divine’ violence that expiates the ‘mythical’ violence of the secular
world, for Arendt it was the Judaeo-Christian conception of the Divine that
engendered the problem. It was this conception of a transcendent moment,
external to the world, that guaranteed the perseverance of attempts at violent
political making. Only a return to the classical and especially the Roman
understanding of power and law offered hope of an escape. On the other
hand, Arendt’s conception of politics as properly realized in a freedom that
escapes instrumental subordination to ends recalls Benjamin’s vision of a
politics of ‘pure means’ as the conceptual gate through which escape from
the violent instrumentalities of ‘law-making’ and ‘law-preserving’ force is
made. Arendt can thus be seen as presenting an attempt to solve the riddle
that Benjamin set and which, in part, he sourced in Sorel’s myth of the proletarian strike.
6
To conclude, the question of how violence, instrumentality and the
political relate to one another illuminates a complicated set of relationships
between Arendt’s thoughts and those of Sorel and Benjamin. The three theorists appear closest in their challenge to the modern practice of political power
as coercive rule. Sorel, Benjamin and Arendt all seek to envisage a form of
revolutionary engagement through which the state as the embodiment of this
practice could be by-passed and overcome. But the major difference between
Sorel on the one hand and Benjamin and Arendt on the other lies in the role
the role given to violence in creating and shaping political agency in revolution. Benjamin and Arendt both seek to reinforce a strict separation between
the violent dispatch of the past and the nonviolent achievement of new political possibilities. They envisage a violence which ends past injustices while
leaving the beginning of something new open to properly creative forces.
At its core, Arendt’s critique of Sorel and like-minded thinkers instantiates – though perhaps doesn’t render sufficiently explicit – a distinction
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43
between two kinds of instrumental justification: first, violence justified as a
tactical-military instrument, meeting coercion with coercion, and heading off
forces that are directed in turn at the negation of emerging political possibilities in revolution; second, violence as an instrument directly shaping and
acting within the political possibilities themselves. For Sorel, violence was
seen to have only limited value in the first sense. Its real utility was seen in
the latter, animating politics by shaping the agents who create it. It is in this
sense, I take it, that Arendt’s idea of instrumental justification can best be
distinguished from Sorel’s approach and those others she attacked in On
Violence.
Christopher Finlay is a lecturer in political theory at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Hume’s Social Philosophy: Human Nature and Commercial
Sociability in a Treatise of Human Nature (2007, Continuum) and various articles on
the history of political thought and on violence and just war in political theory. His
current work focuses on terrorism, ethics and political language. [email: c.j.finlay@
bham.ac.uk]
Acknowledgements
For reading drafts of this article and for their comments, the author would like
to thank Stefan Auer, Patricia Owens, David Roberts and Avi Tucker.
Notes
1. 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, see
Frazer and Hutchings (2008).
4. In this respect, it resembles the kind of inter-personal relation that John Locke
identified 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 to
Arendt’s discussion in On Violence, and this is reflected in a similarly stipulative use of the terms ‘Macht ’ and ‘Gewalt ’ in the German translation of the
work (Arendt, 1970).
6. On which see Benjamin’s Thesis XII in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of
History’ in which the properly Marxist and Spartacist idea of the proletariat as
‘the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations
of the downtrodden’ is contrasted with the Social Democrat attempt to reconfigure it as ‘the redeemer of future generations’ (Benjamin, 1992: 251–2).
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