VIOLENCE
IS A WEAK PROTEST WEAPON. An essay review of Hannah
Arendt. ON VIOLENCE.
New York: Harvest, Harcourt Brace & Company,
1969, 1970.
Hannah Arendt
died in 1975, six years after she produced this
little book to examine why student violence was
disrupting campuses in America and around the world.
Though she has
been dead for more than a quarter of a century, her
writings remain important today to those interested
in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
Just out are new indications of current interest. One
is the correspondence between Arendt and Heinrich
Blucher, her second husband, who came to America with
her in 1942. (Within Four Walls.
Edited and with an introduction by Lotte Kohler,
translated from the German by Peter Constantine. New
York: Harcourt.) Another is a new biography of Arendt
by postmodern theorist Julia Kristeva (Hannah
Arendt. New York: Columbia
University Press).
***
Violence was
on everybody's mind in 1969. The assassination of the
American President in 1963 and the follow-up murder
of his alleged assassin on live television loomed as
a leitmotiv over the remainder of the decade. The
violent May '68 uprisings in Europe marked a
permanent divide in the culture of the Continent.
That was also the year Bobby Kennedy met his violent
death at the hands of an assassin. Martin Luther
King, Jr., went to his violent death too. Students
were violently expressing opposition to the violence
of war in Vietnam and to the subtle violence of
bureaucratic systems everywhere. Black power leaders
used violence or threatened its use to win status for
the underclass. Baby Boomers on and off campuses
turned toward violent means to advance their dreams
of freedom and justice.
Meanwhile,
political and institutional leaders were grasping for
new procedures for containing violence. Established
members of American society, upset over the
disintegration of social order, supported leaders who
suppressed violence with official violence. As the
Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 showed,
official violence could mix with rebellious violence
to produce a societal impasse.
The times
shouted for someone to stand up and tell us about
violence. Leaders on college and university campuses
especially needed insight. The traditional social
fabric of trust in academic settings came apart
before administrators and faculty members knew what
hit them.
***
So Hannah Arendt's
essay was timely. As I re-read it today, three
decades later, Arendt's theoretical calisthenics
reveal themselves as tools for a polemical purpose.
I see her addressing
two audiences from those times --the authorities who
were looking for any rationale for action that would
restore order; and the Baby Boomers who were raising
hell around the world.
The net effect of her
analysis was to show the wrong-headedness of the New
Left's embrace of violence as an end in itself or
even as a means toward a change in the power
structure.
I do not recall
reading that she persuaded student revolutionaries in
the heat of engagement to change course. (In any
event, the summer of '68 was over and the fires of
passion already were shifting by the time her essay
saw print.) On the other hand, I have to believe that
her thoughts offered solace to perplexed authorities.
I can imagine that it reinforced their tattered need
to feel that they had the right to manage events, to
resist violence with the power vested in them.
Arendt took a
thinker's delight in exposing the fuzziness of
thinking behind the New Left activism. (22) She
flayed their failure to understand the Marxism that
they flaunted. She concisely explained the idea of
progress as an over-drawn superstition of the
twentieth century; then she established the New
Left's loyalty to that flawed idea, thus
demonstrating further that they were basing their
violence on unsupportable reasons. (25-31)
The greatest weakness
of the New Left protesters, she found, was their lack
of connection with workers and others outside the
universities. She depicted them as an intellectually
ill-informed generational cohort, disconnected from
the genuine needs of the society.
Arendt's opening
polemical statement was just background, she said,
for an inquiry into the generic "question of
violence in the political realm." (35) But the
intent of her conceptual analysis of violence clearly
remained that of showing the ineptness if not the
futility of the violence of student uprising in the
late 1960s.
Her main point was
that theorists on both the Right and the
Left were wrong when they equated violence with
power.
She set out to show
them that this hoary idea of violence--fortified by
the Judeo-Christian tradition of an angry God--was
logically flawed. Violence, she argued, is always
instrumental in the service of power. (46) It can
never be the basis of
government. Power, on the other hand, is the ability
of a social entity to act in concert (44). It enables
people to function together. (52) It is the essence
and end of all government.
It is not useful for
me here to track the ins and outs of her
differentiation of power over against violence except
to underscore it. "Non-violent power"--a
popular notion in some quarters of the youth movement
of the late 1960s--for Arendt was a redundancy. Power
is by nature non-violent, she said. Violence can
destroy power, but it cannot create power. Looking
back at her text after three decades, it seems to me
that she advanced this line of analysis as a way to
reinforce the polemical point of the entire book. I
am not certain that her categories logically held up;
but they marshaled rhetorical strength behind her
put-down of the New Left.
In the last section
of her essay, Arendt re-mounted her attack on the
idea of violence as a viable form of power. It is a
curious and rather tortured 28 pages of
argumentation. In them, Arendt turned her criticism
on a variety of justifications and rationalizations
of violence. Frantz Fanon's embrace of the idea of
violence as a basic element of life came in for
extensive debunking (69-83). She became particularly
exercised when she confronted the notion that human
violence had a biological base (the behavior of a
"naked ape"). She opposed the
"lebensphilosophie" of Nietzsche and
Bergson because it gave human violence such a
prominent place.
Throughout, she tried
to shift the basis of violence away from the
biological nature of humankind. Youth violence, she
acknowledged, arose as a reaction to the insidious
bureaucratization of post-World War II Western life.
Attacking this "system" through violence,
she said, was an inadequate political response.
In the end, she
admitted that she did not know where events would go.
But she was certain that her distinction between
power and violence would explain them:
Every
decrease in power is an open invitation to
violence--if only because those who hold
power and feel it slipping from their
hands...have always found it difficult to
resist the temptation to substitute violence
for it. (87)
This had to have been
a hastily crafted work by an aging Arendt. She must
have been as bewildered as the legions of her
contemporaries caught unawares by the virulence and
global breadth of violent student rebellion. As a
piece of analysis, it is often strained. As a
polemical address to the rebels, it could not have
been effective. As an intellectual port in the storm,
it might have helped authorities to be less anxious
as they dealt with the unrest.
Whatever its
shortcomings, Arendt's little book has an abiding
usefulness. Today, we see a new wave of violence in
the streets of Seattle, Quebec, Genoa. The ongoing
movement to open the world's markets to free trade is
provoking these reactions. Unlike the student
movements of the 1960s, these protests ARE connected
to the workers and other social groups likely to be
hurt by the globalization system.
The protesters would
be wise to note Arendt's distinction between violence
as an instrument and power as an end. They are
running the risk of confusing violence with power
again. If they developed a thoughtful strategy that
saw power rather than the mere demonstration of
violence as the end they seek, they would stand a
better chance of success. As Arendt said,
Violence
can always destroy power; out of the barrel
of a gun grows the most effective command,
resulting in the most instant and perfect
obedience. What never can grow out of it is
power. (53)
The anti-free-trade
movement will fail to change the momentum of economic
globalization by the exercise of violent protest. At
most the violence will help highlight items on the
agenda of those in power, as it did in the
1960s--violence does get attention in the short run.
Unless the violent protesters formulate an
alternative political vision that could mobilize the
allegiance of people around the world, their efforts
will be weak, no matter how noisy and disruptive.
