Hannah Arendt on Violence and Politics

By Wade Lee Hudson

As political violence permeated the United States and spread across the globe, in 1969 the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote On Violence. This small, passionate book analyzed the nature and sources of violence, offered some prophetic speculations, and challenged many widespread assumptions — including some that I had embraced but now reject. This re-evaluation will lead me to rewrite some of the content on this site. 

Arendt reminded us that “the end of human action … can never be reliably predicted… The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.” Unfortunately, however, “no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs (violence) has yet appeared on the political scene.” 

Nor is a substitute likely to appear so long as national independence, namely, freedom from foreign rule, and the sovereignty of the state [prevails]... Under these circumstances, there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they do not think… They put to sleep our common sense… (Soon) robot soldiers will have made “human soldiers completely obsolete.” (M.W. Thring)

The recent shift to air wars, drones, precision-guided bombs, and the looming development of autonomous fighter jets make this prediction disturbingly prescient. Worse yet, oppressive technology built by the “scientifically minded” is spreading throughout society, as “intellectuals” join the ranks of the elite. The emergence of the surveillance state is one example. Next on the horizon is the “metaverse,” with humans lying around wearing virtual reality headsets interacting with each other as disembodied avatars.

Arendt’s critique of technology, offered in 1969, is incisive.

Technological “progress” is leading in so many instances straight into disaster; that the sciences, taught and learned by this generation, seem not merely unable to undo the disastrous consequence of their own technology… The seemingly irresistible proliferation of techniques and machines, far from only threatening certain classes with unemployment, menaces the existence of whole nations and conceivably of all mankind.

The climate disaster is now more widely recognized. The threat of a global nuclear war remains. And though a human-created superbug may someday wipe out most humans, the United States is resisting an effort to negotiate a treaty with penalties that could facilitate international cooperation to fight the next virus. 

Arendt challenged the idea of unlimited “Progress” that rationalizes so much modern activity.  

The notion that there is such a thing as progress of mankind as a whole was unknown prior to the seventeenth century… Beginning with the nineteenth century, however, all such limitations disappeared… The irrational nineteenth-century belief in unlimited progress has found universal acceptance chiefly because of the astounding development of the natural sciences... It is by no means impossible that we have reached in both cases a turning point, the point of destructive returns… Progress, in other words, can no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes we have let loose. 

Its great advantage becomes clear as soon as one compares it with other concepts of history — such as “eternal recurrences,” the rise and fall of empires, the haphazard sequence of essentially unconnected events — all of which can equally be documented and justified…

I do not need to add that all our experiences in this century, which has constantly confronted us with the totally unexpected, stand in flagrant contradiction to these notions and doctrines, whose very popularity seems to consist in offering a comfortable, speculative, or pseudo-scientific refuge from reality.

A guarantee that in the final analysis rests on little more than a metaphor is not the most solid basis to erect a doctrine upon… The ancient notion of a Golden Age [such as the Garden of Eden] at the beginning, from which everything else is derived, implies the rather unpleasant certainty of continuous decline… 

If only the practice of violence would make it possible to interrupt automatic processes in the realm of human affairs, the preachers of violence would have won an important point.

Underlying Arendt’s critique of Progress was her rejection of the idea that biological “evolution,” an amoral process, necessarily leads to “cultural evolution,” which ideally upholds moral values.   

As Arendt put it:

Human culture is not linear, different cultures develop in different directions and at differing paces, and it is not satisfactory or productive to assume cultures develop in the same way… While I find much of the work of the zoologists fascinating, I fail to see how it can possibly apply to our problem. In order to know that people will fight for their homeland we hardly had to discover instincts

None of the properties of creativity is adequately expressed in metaphors drawn from the life process. To beget and to give birth are no more creative than to die is annihilating; they are but different phases of the same, ever-recurring cycle in which all living things are held as though they were spellbound. Neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man's faculty of action, the ability to begin something new. 

And I think it can be shown that no other human ability has suffered to such an extent from the progress of the modern age, for progress, as we have come to understand it, means growth, the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger. The bigger a country becomes in terms of population, of objects, and of possessions, the greater will be the need for administration and with it the anonymous power of the administrators... Whatever the administrative advantages and disadvantages of centralization may be, its political result is always the same: monopolization of power causes the drying up or oozing away of all authentic power sources in the country.

Biological evolution has clearly produced in humans a large human frontal lobe with enormous intellectual powers. Those powers, however, may undermine emotional intelligence, spiritual experience, and a dedication to ethical action. Intellectual powers may even nurture moral devolution.  Arendt wrote, “The additional gift of ‘reason’ makes man a more dangerous animal… Nothing, in my opinion, could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organic thought in political matters by which power and violence are interpreted in biological terms.”

The term “evolution” carries with it a positive connotation, a belief that the change is an improvement, but there’s no guarantee that social change will involve positive growth. To transfer the logic of the survival of the fittest and natural selection to cultural change is a leap of faith. “Violence is neither beastly nor irrational… (It) does not mean that (humans) become animal-like.” To speak of social change as evolution is to apply a biological metaphor. 

Genetic evolution is not a moral process. The “survival of the fittest” argues that organisms best adjusted to their environment are the most successful in surviving and reproducing. This ability is based in large part on the ability to cooperate with others of the same species. During humanity’s early history, for many centuries, this cooperation was embedded in our DNA, but as societies became larger and more hierarchical, self-centered competition began to suppress other-centered cooperation, leaving us with the need to “liberate our inner hunter-gatherer.” 

Moreover, the concept of genetic “evolution” reflects a human-centered bias that suggests the goal of evolution is the emergence of humanity. However, we humans are not life’s be-all and end-all. As Carl Sagan said, humans are merely “temporary inhabitants of a dust mote.” Nevertheless, good people can counter the domination of their frontal lobe, oppose cruelty in the world, and nurture nonviolent cooperation.

Arendt’s lack of faith in guaranteed progress contributed to her denial of efforts to justify violence as a way to advance progress, such as claiming violence can heal the wounds it’s inflicted. “To identify the national liberation movements with such outbursts is to prophesy their doom… Victory would not result in changing the world (or the system), but only its personnel,” she wrote. The consequences subsequently witnessed from armed revolutions justify her skepticism.

Her moral perspective de-emphasized self-interest and emphasized “disinteredness.” Every revolutionary movement has been led by

the disinterested, who were motivated by compassion or by a passion for justice... This generation, trained like its predecessors in hardly anything but the various brands of the my-share-of-the-pie social and political theories, has taught us a lesson about manipulation, or, rather, its limits, which we would do well not to forget… The manipulation addicts, those who fear it unduly no less than those who have set their hopes on it, hardly notice when the chickens come home to roost…

She defined power as people coming together to act effectively.

Power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance… To speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it. .. 

The justification of violence on the grounds of a grand strategy concerning some ultimate, automatic historical process is a rationalization.

Hegel’s and Marx’s great trust in the dialectical “power of negation”...rests on a much older philosophical prejudice:.. that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good. Such time-honored opinions have become dangerous… They inspire hope and dispel fear — a treacherous hope used to dispel legitimate fear… At that juncture they discovered what we call today the Establishment and what earlier was called the System, and it was this discovery that made them turn to the praise of violent action and made them turn to the praise of violent action…

Violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals... To ask the impossible in order to obtain the possible is not always counterproductive… No doubt, “violence pays,” but the trouble is that it pays indiscriminately,... If only such “reforms” can be made with comparative ease, then that violence will be effective with respect to the relatively long-term objective of structural change… The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

The modern economy has incorporated ordinary workers into the dominant social system.

Pareto understood that the rapid integration of the workers into the social and political body of the nation actually amounted to “an alliance of bourgeoisie and working people,” to the “embourgeoisement” of the workers, which then, according to him, gave rise to a new system, which he called “Pluto-democracy”...

The enormous growth of productivity in the modern world was by no means due to an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on … the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists,… a new elite… Its members are more dispersed and less bound by clear interests than groups in the old class system;

With her focus on moral action, Arendt rejected appeals to “enlightened self-interest.”

It goes against the very nature of self-interest to be enlightened…. the self qua self cannot reckon in terms of long-range interest... Self-interest, when asked to yield to “true” interest — that is, the interest of the world as distinguished from that of the self — will always reply, Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin. To expect people, who have not the slightest notion of what the res publico, the public thing, is, to behave nonviolently and argue rationally in matters of interest is neither realistic nor reasonable.

Arendt suggests that rather than democracy or autocracy, modern systemic elitism is ruled by bureaucracy.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant… 

The huge party machines have succeeded everywhere in overruling the voice of the citizens, even in countries where freedom of speech and association is still intact… The transformation of government into administration, or of republics into bureaucracies, and the disastrous shrinkage of the public realm that went with it have a long and complicated history hroughout the modern age; and this process has been considerably accelerated during the last hundred years through the rise of party bureaucracies.

No wonder the “administrative state” has become the target of great resentment. The hardening of these bureaucracies, however, has left them brittle.

The disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years…are accompanied and often accelerated by the simultaneous decline of the various party systems, all of more or less recent origin and designed to serve the political needs of mass populations… Bigness is afflicted with vulnerability; cracks in the power structure of all but the small countries are opening and widening. And while no one can say with assurance where and when the breaking point has been reached, we can observe, almost measure, how strength and resiliency are insidiously destroyed, leaking, as it were, drop by drop from our institutions.

In 1969 she noticed a relatively new pattern that has become more pronounced since then.

Moreover, there is the recent rise of a curious new brand of nationalism, usually understood as a swing to the Right, but more probably an indication of a growing, world-wide resentment against “bigness” as such… We now watch how an ethnic “nationalism” begins to threaten with dissolution the oldest and best-established nation-states… 

Along with this trend,

it is as though we have fallen under a fairyland spell which permits us to do the “impossible” on the condition that we lose the capacity of doing the possible, to achieve fantastically extraordinary feats on the condition of no longer being able to attend properly to our everyday needs… Our power has become impotent… Again, we do not know where these developments will lead us, but we know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence — if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their hands, be they the government or be they the governed, have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it.

On the other hand, she was encouraged by the New Left rebellions, whose moral character clashed with its materialistic, Marxist roots. “The one positive political slogan the new movement has put forth,” she argued, “the claim for “participatory democracy’ that has echoed around the globe and constitutes the most significant common denominator of the rebellions in the East and the West, derives from the best in the revolutionary tradition — the council system… The setting of a “new example” will have a chance, if at all, in a small country, or in small, well-defined sectors in the mass societies of the large powers.”

The end result of my reading of Arendt is a heightened sense that humanity may be on a downward spiral that will require a massive, independent social movement to reverse. I no longer assume humanity, overall, has progressed. I no longer believe a spiritual “life force” preceded the emergence of life and death. Rather, I assume the laws of physics and physical forces produced the emergence of the known universe, which led to what was likely a coincidental combination of factors to produce life and death. The universe, as Albert Camus said, is indifferent to humanity. Facing this reality is humbling, but essential for the sake of honest community. Life and death are awe-inspiring and wonderful, but they’re all we have. We can’t rely on Progress, God, or “cultural evolution” to carry us forward. Nevertheless, we can commit to disinterested moral action (rather then “enlightened self-interest”), commune with Mother Nature, and honor life and death. The prospects for success are uncertain. We can only take care of ourselves in order to serve others, do what we can to relieve suffering, and live the way we want others to live, with a dedication to the pursuit of truth, justice, and beauty. These conclusions prompted by Arendt’s book will compel me to review this site’s content and most likely, to some degree, modify it accordingly.