Moreover, the collapse of onto- logical 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 — trace- able 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, e. This arose only through the historical experi- ence 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, With this new experience came the atten- dant 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 revolution- ary 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, — 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, —6.
With the collapse of the Old Regime, the French encountered the problem of beginning in the historical present. 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 politi- cal 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. Its practical result 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 into revolutionary politics Arendt, —4, 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 s.
At least symbol- ically, 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 politi- cally.
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 author- ity 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. 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, — 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.
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, —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 s. 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, —4, — The American narrative thus provided Arendt with a critical counterpoint to the French experience. 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 play in this story?
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 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. 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.
The difference is twofold, relating both to the question of which ends can provide justification for violence and that of how they do so. 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.
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. Political goals as such provide only indirect justification, if they can truly be said to provide justification at all.
Her view of the instrumental effectiveness of violence in the context of liberation follows the Clausewitzian understand- ing 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 over- whelming it.
This kind of military violence has the purely negative useful- ness 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 politi- cal self-constitution.
To see these, it is necessary to bring into discussion the intermediate figure of Walter Benjamin. Arendt knew Benjamin personally and was intimately acquainted with at least some of his work Young-Bruehl, —3, —8; Arendt, Central to these concerns are the relationships between political ends and violent means, i.
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 legal- positivist accounts of the legitimacy of violent means considered indepen- dently 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.
Benjamin, 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. In both cases, there are physical deaths. Law itself is almost literally written in blood. For the Israelites, by contrast, the Divine violence inscribes no new law. 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 immedi- ate: its purpose is to annihilate, not to discipline. 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 insti- tutions — needed to realize them.
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 social- ists — was the notion that the state could be used as an instrument for bringing about social progress.
By attempting to harness its irreducibly coercive mech- anisms, revolutionaries acting through the state inevitably inclined towards Terror Sorel, []: 28—9.
Any attempt, consequently, to take over govern- ment would corrupt the revolution, steering it towards terror, as its ends would be irrecoverably conditioned by the means chosen to try and achieve them. 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, []: —6. For contemporary revolutionaries who sought to achieve emancipation through revolutionary action, therefore, it was crucial to by-pass the state. 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.
The three theor- ists 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 revol- ution.
Benjamin and Arendt both seek to reinforce a strict separation between the violent dispatch of the past and the nonviolent achievement of new politi- cal possibilities. They envisage a violence which ends past injustices while leaving the beginning of something new open to properly creative forces. 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. Christopher Finlay is a lecturer in political theory at the University of Birming- ham. His current work focuses on terrorism, ethics and political language. Notes 1. Thanks to Stefan Auer for pointing this out to me. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Kevin Attell. London: Abacus. Arendt, Hannah On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah Macht und Gewalt trans.
Gisela Uellenberg. Munich: Piper Verlag. Arendt, Hannah Crises of the Republic. Arendt, Hannah [] On Revolution. London: Penguin. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to philosophy, non fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, On Violence pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:.
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