9780241631645

PENGUIN PRESS

Hannah Arendt OnViolence

With an Introduction by

Lyndsey Stonebridge

‘Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it’ Why has violence played such a significant role in human history? Written in 1970, with the Holocaust and Hiroshima still fresh in recent memory, war in Vietnam raging and the streets of Europe and America exploding into student protest, Hannah Arendt’s seminal work dissects violence in the twentieth century: its nature and causes, its relationship with politics and war, its role in the modern age. Arendt warns against the glamorization of violence by revolutionary causes, and argues that true, lasting power can never grow ‘out of the barrel of a gun’.

‘Incisive, deeply probing, written with clarity and grace, it provides an ideal framework for understanding the turbulence of our times’ The Nation

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On Violence

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Hannah Arendt On Violence

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On Violence Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, and received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship, and in 1941 she left France for the United States. Her many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined the famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’. She died in 1975.

Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (2024); Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and lives in London.

Hannah Arendt On Violence Introduction by Lyndsey Stonebridge

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First published in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1969 First published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 2023 001 Text copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1969, 1970 Introduction copyright © Lyndsey Stonebridge, 2023 Set in 11.25/14 pt Dante MT Std Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ​­978–0–241–63164–5

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Introduction Hannah Arendt wrote On Violence between 1967 and 1969, two years during which the United States experienced some of the worst domestic violence in a century. A former refugee who had escaped European fascism for America in 1941, Arendt had known the realities of political violence at first hand. ​­Twenty-​ ­five years later, here was violence again. The helicopters buzzed, the big men roared and the military-​ ​­ industrial-​labour complex flexed its intricately webbed muscles. Rebels and students built tunnels and barricades and loved one another as though their lives depended on it. None of this is what you think it is, she wrote in this slim, quietly enraged book. The bullets and the bombs, the blood and the fists, the sharp-​­ ​­ suited death strategists and the children in camouflage; these are not power, and still less will they guarantee genuine political power. In truth, violence is a symptom of how powerless we have become. Now in the last decade of her life, Hannah Arendt looked through the smoke and the gunshots and saw the starkest evidence yet of the failure of modern politics by the end of her century.

Never at ease with itself, when she’d arrived America at least appeared to have laid down its guns. The horrors in Europe had cast a flattering shadow over the nation’s racism. By 1960 the dis­ ciplined pacifism of the civil rights movement had begun to make demonstrable political gains. For a moment, it almost looked as if the nation might make good on its promise to be a democratic v

Introduction

republic fit for all citizens. This ​­non-​­violent America was only ever a fiction, as the men returning from the Korean War, Black Americans and the parents of murdered civil rights activists knew.

National unravelling began in late 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis blew the imminent prospect of global nuclear annihilation into consciousness. Fear got big again. One year later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The pastoral days were over, and America began to resemble ‘a motion picture with the projector out of control’.* In 1967, the film began to melt and the projector caught fire.

This was the year that the number of US soldiers sent to​ ­Vietnam – ​and the number killed ​­there – ​rose to a point where it was no longer possible to disguise the carnage. In April, 400,000 marched in New York against the war and Martin Luther King addressed the crowd. The summer of 1967 is known as the Summer of Love in San Francisco, but in Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, Newark and Detroit it was the summer when Black communities connected poverty, police violence and racism with political rage, and riots broke out. In July, 43 people were killed in Detroit. The same month, H. Rap Brown ( Jamil Abdullah al-​­ ​­ Amin), then Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested for incitement to riot.

‘Violence,’ Rap Brown later declared in a widely reported statement, ‘is as American as cherry pie.’† The police, state governors and the mayoralties agreed: future resistance would be met with brute force. When a ‘Stop the Draft’ protest took place in New York that December, the authorities reacted with immediate mass arrests, including those of the poet Allen Ginsberg and the celebrity paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock. What, at the * Richard E. Rubenstein, Rebels in Eden: Mass Political Violence in the United States (London: Macdonald, 1970), 2. † Quoted in Rubenstein, Rebels in Eden, 7.

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start of the year, had looked like protests, disturbances and local riots began to look like everyone’s civil war.

Ten days after the New York protest, Hannah Arendt made her way up some rickety stairs to a studio attic on West 21st Street. The apartment belonged to the dancer and choreographer Shirley Broughton, host of Theater of Ideas, an intellectual talking shop. Arendt was there to debate ‘The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act’, along with her friend, the poet Robert Lowell (who had been a conscientious objector during the war), Noam Chomsky and the Irish historian, former diplomat and, later, politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, who had been struck on the head by the NYPD in the protest the week before.

The editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert B. Silvers, moderated, and Susan Sontag was a discussant. The attic was stuffy, the chairs uncomfortable, the debates notoriously badtempered and there was to be no smoking. Arendt, who had a twenty-​­plus a day habit, was not exactly feeling peaceable.

In her opening contribution, she laid out the argument that forms the core of what would become On Violence. Contrary to appearances, violence is not a display of political power, she said, but its opposite: violence comes from impotence. By power, Arendt means the kind of politics that is made by human action; power is there to be picked up, run with, stretched and bent into new forms of political being and belonging. Citizens empower other citizens. We consent to the law and to authority not simply because they are there, but exactly because their efficacy, and their justness, depends upon our consent. Political power is perhaps the most human power there is. Not because it is big and violent, but because it is frail and thus infinitely precious, kept alive only by our willingness to recognize one another, our debts to both the past and the future, and to act courageously on that basis. For Hannah Arendt, true political power is how we create communities and vii