Many, including me, have relied on Max Weber’s definition of a state as “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate violence”. I thought that violence was synonymous with power and that the best we could hope for was a legitimate exercise of violence, one that was proportionate and used only as a last resort.
I have a blog post about state monopolies on violence because of Hannah Arendt. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was my re-introduction to moral philosophy. It, more than any other book, has informed this blog. To Arendt, thinking and judging are paramount. It is not so much, to her, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is instead that the unexamined life exists in a state of mortal peril, separated only by circumstances from becoming one of the “good Germans” who did nothing as their neighbours were murdered.
This blog is my attempt to think and to judge. To take moral positions, so that I am in the habit of it.
It’s a vulnerable spot, to stake out a position. You must always live with the risk of being later proved wrong. Or, perhaps worse, having been proved wrong before you even set pen to paper (or pixels to screen).
In her essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt demolished the premises upon which I based my own essay on how states should use their monopoly on violence. It’s rare that I get to see my own work so completely rendered useless. I found the process both useful and humbling.
On Violence is divided into three sections. In the first, Arendt covers how violence has been used and thought about in the decade preceding her essay (it was published in 1969). In the second, she lays out new definitions and models for strength, violence, power, and authority and challenges the definitions use by the great thinkers of the past. In the final section, she re-examines the recent events of her time in light of her definitions and discusses the promise and danger of power and violence.
So, enter the end of the 1960s. The past decade has seen student sit-ins and protests at practically every university. It has seen the end of official segregation and the ongoing struggles of the civil rights movement. In Europe, a military coup toppled the French Fourth Republic and liberalization in Czechoslovakia led to an invasion by Soviet tanks. In Vietnam, America took up France’s failing war and found themselves unable to defeat a small cadre of revolutionaries.
Against this backdrop, Arendt remarks on the most dangerous fact of all: that through our artifice, we have attained the means (i.e. nuclear weapons) to destroy ourselves. There is, Arendt remarks, an age-old conflict between means and ends, in that means always threaten to overshadow the ends they seek to bring about.
Given that there is always an element of chance when it comes to attaining our ends, nuclear weapons mark the development of a new era, where means dominate ends because all means are so terrifying and all ends so uncertain. When you asked a youth in the 1960s where they hoped to be in the future, they would always preface an answer with “well, assuming I am still alive…”.
None of this was made more comforting by the many commonplace myths Arendt identified. Among the think tanks and the military industrial complex, she saw a tendency to transmute hypotheses into reality, to believe that possibilities identified using only reason (and no evidence) could become universal truths; the people in charge of the nuclear weapons did not believe their ends to be at all uncertain, despite all evidence to the contrary. Among the left, she noticed a glorification of violence that had no place in the texts of Marx (let alone in a movement supposedly built on freedom and compassion). The left, Arendt worried, was imbuing violence with all sorts of properties that it had never had, like ‘creativity’, or ‘the ability to heal’.
It is important to note that Arendt had no time for talk of violent revolutions. To her (as she claims, it was with Marx), “dreams never come true”; violence against an oppressor was just violence, not a transformative force capable of launching a new era. In this, she had the weight of recent bitter history on her side, as the communist revolutions were revealed to have brought about nothing but tyranny.
It is only after laying out this tortured landscape, full of pitfalls and dangers, that Arendt turned to the philosophy of violence, the main purpose of this essay.
The first part of this examination is an observation: philosophers and politicians, from the left to the right, have, for a long time, identified violence as a mere outgrowth or component of power. Arendt trots out a dizzying array of quotes, all as plausible as the Max Weber quote I opened with but coming from the likes of C. Wright Mills, Sartre, Sorrel, Jouvenel, Voltaire, von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, John Stuart Mill, and Hobbes.
It is against all of these definitions, which equate power with violence (and especially coercive violence that propagates the will of whomever wields it) that Arendt stands. She instead seeks a positive power in the philosophy (seldom actually achieved) of the revolutions of the 1700s (and the earlier ideal of polis life, deeply flawed as it was in practice), which viewed government of “man over man” as no fit way to live. In this framework, she identifies power, as distinct from violence, with “the rules of the game”, the set of socially acceptable actions. If you step outside of these rules, power manifests as social consequences: entreaties to change, glares, angry words, and in the extreme case, shunning
This definition is not non-coercive. To social creates like us, social punishments are real punishments. They may not be violence, but they can still act to change our will; or even to shape what we can will.
What prevents the “rules of the game” from being a tyranny (albeit a tyranny with majority support) of another name is some sort of democracy, some ability for people broadly to gain power and push; the chance to have a hand in writing the rules we all must play by. To use the language of the great revolutions of the 1700s, this is “the consent of the governed”.
If you doubt the existence of power as Arendt defines it, I challenge you to go to some public place and violate its norms. Any sufficient violation of norms should see the public exercise their power on you and will probably force you to stop. It is intensely hard for us humans to go against the will of a group, especially if that group makes it displeasure known. And it rarely even needs to come to anything as overt as glares; power is invisible, until you sense its boundaries. It’s a rare person who can act, knowing that they will immediately face intense social censure for their actions. It’s recognizing this, when so few others have, that marks Arendt’s brilliance.
(Interestingly, if you were to complete this challenge, the norms that you violate would most likely be norms that you otherwise agree with. The rules of the game are supposed to exist to make us feel happy and satisfied, able to interact with each other without fear. Personhood is an interface that carries expectations in order to receive recognition.)
Power will always be less absolute than violence. You obey a criminal with a gun far more readily than you obey the law, because the criminal (or rather, the gun) has an immediacy that power does not possess. Therefore, a law without popular support can be enforced, but only at the barrel of the gun. The violence of the enforcement will overwhelm the power of the majority.
Note the use of majority here, because that word is important in Arendt’s conception; to her, power will always require a majority. From this and from the immediacy of violence, it follows that the only way a minority can enforce their will on a majority is via violence.
Once you conceive of power as “the simple rules of the game”, it is clear how much weaker the tyrant is than the body politic. Tyranny falls apart as soon its few enforcers refuse to wield the weapons necessary for its survival, because there is no back up, nothing else, that can maintain it. Power can survive the complete annihilation of the government, because the government is its mere outgrowth, not its heart.
That said, if we are concerned with the ability of tyrants to rule through violence, we should be fearful of the continual improvements we are making to the implements of violence. It is not, as you might think, simply that the implements have become more destructive. There is as much space between the knight and the peasant with a pitchfork as there is between the man with a rifle and the stealth bomber, which is to say that the tyrant has always outclassed the revolutionary.
The true danger is rather how modern implements of violence allow the tyrant to shrink their inner circle and yet still maintain their monopoly on violence. Automation has made violence more efficient, not yet to the pathological case where one man with a button and an army of robots can hold a whole nation in fear, but there is a sense we are fast approaching that terrifying state.
If tyranny shows how violence can unmake power, it is rebellions that show how power can overshadow violence. Rebellions are successful when the state has lost its grip on power, not when the rebels win on the battlefield. Armed rebellions are often made needless by the very fact of their existence, because rebels can only arm themselves when the gatekeepers of weapons decide they no longer wish to support the state. When the army refuses the demands of the strongman, the regime is already over. Armed rebellions succeed more because they erode the power of the state to the point where no one will back it than as a result of any decisive war of manoeuvres.
There is, of course, room for state violence outside of the extremes. Like in the case of tyranny, Arendt considers state violence to be the opposite of state power. It emerges only when power has failed (e.g. when power alone is not enough to keep a criminal “playing by the rules of the game”) or when power is breaking down (e.g. the police being called on to disperse protestors marching on the government). Because of this, Arendt believes that (democratic) states should not be defined by violence, which is only theirs in exigency.
The interaction between power and violence is a topic Arendt returns to over and over in this section. She also believes, that violence flips power on its head (“the extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All”) – and steadily erodes it. I’m not entirely sure what the mechanism is supposed to be here though; it could be that when everyone sees violence as the quickest way to their ends, the structures of power – the incentive to play by the rules of the game in order to change them – disappears. Or it could be that violence leads to violence in return, as everyone tries to protect themselves without being able to resort to power. Regardless, the outcome is the same.
Terror is the result of violence that destroys all power and then fails to abdicate. The Soviet government provides one of the clearest examples of terror. After it shattered society, it seeded it with informants. This meant that no one could seek out others to organize power, because there was always the fear that you might be conspiring with an informant. Russia, I think, is still grappling with this total destruction of all power. It is unclear to me if it is at all capable of returning to rule based on power, rather than (in some part, at least) violence.
Nonviolent resistance movements, like Gandhi’s, work only when the government is scared of the corrosive effects of violence. Sit-ins and salt marches would have been met with massacres if used against the Soviets or Nazis, but against a British government that feared the results of becoming reliant on violence, they were successful.
(The British were right to fear violence. After all, it was soldiers tasked with “pacifying” the colonies that launched the coup d’état that ended the French Fourth Republic. Arendt strongly believed that relying on violence abroad would erode power at home, probably as a result of this experience, not to mention the violence used to quell anti-war demonstrators in America.)
These ideas provide the conceptual framework for Arendt to re-examine what was then recent history and justify why the theorist still has a right to talk about these things.
Arendt pauses to explain that she feels the need to justify her right to speak on these subjects, because of what she claims is an ongoing tendency to explain human behaviour in terms of animal behaviour. Scientists, says Arendt, are increasingly expanding the scope of which behaviours should be considered “natural”, which is to say, the same as other animals would exhibit. Tied into this is a nascent and seldom spoken belief, that reason requires us to sever some of these vestiges of our animal nature.
Arendt disagrees strenuously with both the premise and the prescription. First, she believes that it is wrong to say that we are proved to be more and more like animals. Instead, it is more correct to say that animals are proved to be more and more like us. It is still us that has the singular faculty for reason, but it is certainly amusing and interesting to see all of the ways in which we are not as alone upon our pedestal as we once assumed.
(I think she makes this distinction because if we are like animals, then the study of human nature belongs to the biologist. But if animals are like us, then human nature is still the domain of the philosopher. It’s a subtle difference, but to her, a very important one.)
When it comes to removing human capacity – like for rage – Arendt sees nothing but dehumanization. Rage, she explains, can be rational. We rage when we suspect something could be done but it is not. Rage is turned not against the volcano, but against the heavens for failing to prevent it, or the government for failing to protect us.
(I have been known to view critiques of science like this, from non-scientists, with suspicion. I think Arendt gets a pass because it is clear that her disagreements with science aren’t based on a fear of science disproving one of her specific political positions. Arendt is good at this in general; in an appendix, she cautions against a scientific meritocracy without using any of the tired and silly arguments people normally resort to.)
Rage and violence can also be a rational reaction to hypocrisy (if reason is a trap, why step into it?), although Arendt is quick to point out that this can backfire in two ways (when seeking out hypocrisy becomes an end into itself, as during The Terror; when violence is used to provoke violence and therefore “reveal” a hypocrisy that never existed).
To be honest, I’m not sure many people are arguing that scientists should remove fundamental characteristics of people anymore. But it strikes me as the sort of thing people plausibly could have argued about in the past. And it seemed worth noting that Arendt sees a (limited) role for violence or anger in politics (although it is also worth noting that she views violence per se as outside of the political sphere, because it has nothing to do with power). And finally, I should mention that like practically everyone, she views violence in self-defence as justified.
But Arendt does find many justifications of violence to be foolish. She cautions against “natural” metaphors for power, those that associate it with outward growth and fecundity. Once you accept these, she believes, you also accept that violence has the power of renewal. Violence clears away the bounds on power and breathes new life into it by allowing it to expand again (imagine the analogy to forest fire, which clears away dead wood and lets a new forest grow). Given all of the follies and pains of empire, it is clear that even if this were true (and she is not convinced that it is), it is not recommended. Power, to Arendt, is perfectly content without expansion (and indeed, violent expansion, to her, always erodes power and replaces it with violence).
Nowhere does she find violence more dangerous then with respect to racism. On racist ideologies, she says:
Racism, as distinguished from race, is not a fact of life, but an ideology, and the deeds it leads to are not reflex actions, but deliberate acts based on pseudo-scientific theories. Violence in interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not “irrational”; it is the logical and rational consequence of racism, by which I do not mean some rather vague prejudices on either side, but an explicit ideological system.
(To make it perfectly clear, she means “rational” here to read only as internal consistency, not external consistency.)
Luckily, power can overcome prejudices. The non-violent actions of the Civil Rights Movement are one of her best examples of the fruits of power, which broke apart segregation and ended (for a time) most restrictions at the ballot box.
That said, even here does Arendt see some role for limited political violence (I am using this to mean what it normally does, but should acknowledge Arendt would view this particular word combination as an oxymoron). She acknowledges that sometimes, it is only through the violence of the radical that the moderate is given a hearing. Unfortunately, beyond cautions that violence is useful only for short-term objectives and that it is indiscriminate in its ends (that is to say, it is a poor tool for systemic change, because it is as likely to gain token concessions as real change), Arendt offers no real framework with which to evaluate when violence might be justified.
Such a framework would be especially useful when evaluating violence against bureaucracy, a major theme of the last section. Arendt identifies bureaucracy as the force with which the student movements are fighting and claims that it is tempting to resort to violence when dealing with it because bureaucracy can leave you with no one to argue with and no avenue through which to gather and use power.
It is because of this that Arendt stands against the “progressive” goal of centralization and instead prefers federalism. This is interesting to me, because Arendt is normally identified as a leftist and her writing quotes Marx heavily. It is a testament to the contempt with which she holds bureaucracy (no doubt heavily influenced by her work analyzing the bureaucracy of the Nazis) that she views striking against it as more important than the progressive priorities that can be attained via centralization and bureaucracy.
Or perhaps it is just that Arendt’s leftist views are actually quite heterodox; there’s a certainly a way to read her that suggests hostility to the welfare state and a preference (perhaps for reasons grounded in a desire to promote virtue and human connection?) for communal charity on a more local scale as a replacement.
Arendt acknowledges that bureaucracy has made the “impossible possible” (e.g. the landings on the moon), but she believes that this has come at the cost of making daily tasks (like governing) impossible.
To this conundrum, she offers no answer. This, I think, is very characteristic of Arendt. It’s very easy to see what she opposes, but hard to find a model of government for which she advocates. I often find her criticism incredibly insightful, so this curious stopping short, her refusal to recommend any specific action, is often frustrating.
As it is, all I’m left with are fears. The trends she laid out – the dangers of our means overshadowing our ends and the ossification that comes with bureaucracy – have not gone away. If anything, they’ve intensified. And while this book gave me a new model of power and violence, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
But then, Arendt would probably say there’s no point in trying to do something with it alone. Power can only come in groups. And her students are probably supposed to talk with others, to share our concerns, and to think about what we can do together, to keep the world running a little longer.