An Arendtian Look at the Concept of Violence

María Teresa Muñoz

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness (…) seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than

to think what we are doing

(H. Arendt, 1998a, p. 5)

In the following reflections, I present an analysis of the concept of violence. My hypothesis is

that the Arendtian distinction between power and violence articulates what might be called her

theory of communicative action. The text is divided into three parts: (I) proposes a tentative and

imprecise definition of the concept of 'violence' and offers a brief analysis of the concept of

violence and its link with the notion of power; subsequently, (II) reviews the Arendtian

approaches to violence in The Human Condition, On Violence and, briefly, On Revolution;

finally, in (III) I retrieve from the analysis presented in the previous paragraphs what might be

considered Arendt´s theory of communicative action.

It is high time to recover the Arendtian view on the concept of 'violence'; there is much to be

learned from her approach to the political from an attitude that lies beyond the disputes between

competing ideological models. The Arendtian contribution to the debate concerning the

distinction between power and violence offers the possibility of revising the depth grammar, as

Wittgenstein would put it, of our political discourse and of our way of doing political

philosophy. What interests me, is not her diagnosis of contemporary societies but her

conceptual strategy: her criticism of the "depth grammar" of political discourse, which serves as

a basis to unmask the political articulation given in contemporary societies. Arendt calibrates to

what extent a particular concept has moved away from its origins, and traces the interweaving

of concepts over the course of time, pointing out moments of conceptual confusion. This way of

philosophizing, which has been considered as a sort of phenomenology (Parekh 1981;

Habermas 1986, 210), frontally rejects causal explanations for political phenomena. Like

Arendt, I contend that this latter type of explanation misunderstands the nature of political

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action. Against the behaviorist ideas that predominated in the social sciences during the fifties

and sixties, she shows the importance of the spontaneity and unpredictability of action (Arendt

1958, 230-247). One of her main contributions is thus the desire to obtain a comprehensive

understanding of politics by means of a novel approach to political concepts and phenomena. I

think, like we can see in this paper, On Violence is an example of this reflection´s way. In the

firth part, she does an analysis of newspaper articles, recent events and literature contemporary

about violence (Sartre and Fanon). She is worried about the glorification of violence by the

Black Power movement and she was simultaneously a supporter of the early civil rights

movements.

Arendt does not seek to adequately describe the phenomena, but rather understands and defends

a series of expectations, ideals and principles to life in common. It is a view with an eminent

political load. In fact, all of her works from the fifties and sixties could be considered the result

of successive attempts to rethink the sense, the specificity and the dignity of politics. For this

reason this perspective is characterized by an interesting relationship between theory and praxis:

her conceptual distinctions have practical consequences.

Following the Arendtian example of locating herself beyond political and academic positions, I

aim to recover one of her main contributions, namely: her understanding of the political by

means of a novel approach to the conceptual environment in which it is articulated and

expressed. From this viewpoint, the conceptual innovation proposed in relation to politics and,

specifically, regarding the notions of violence and power, has as its background the crisis of the

foundationalist paradigm in political theory1.

1 This crisis has been extensively worked since the 1980s and 1990s by authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Leford, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, among others. In 1993, Chantal Mouffe published The return of the political. This is a collection of essays of which addresses the dilemmas posed by the revival of political philosophy. This renaissance is dominated by the debate between Kantian Rawls's liberalism and the critical communitarianism that it has undergone. I consider, as I have argued elsewhere (Muñoz 2013), that Arendt defends a loss of the foundations of politics, an overcoming of foundational political thought, which has its axis in the difference between politics and the political.

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I

Let us start postulating a tentative and always imprecise definition of the concept of 'violence'.

This will require a previous demarcation of its conceptual environment. When we use this

concept we often allude to

Compel, force, violate, break, manipulate, control, monitor, assault, wrong, transgress, dominate, submit, impose, coerce, injure.

Thus, we could tentatively agree that by violence we understand coercion by an agent or agents

upon another individual or group to undertake or forgo actions, or adopt beliefs.

Whoever accepts this definition might comment that when violence is exercised, someone

compels, forces, violate, dominates, imposes, assaults, in order to fulfill a desire or achieve an

end. Violence is exercised, therefore, with the goal of having someone do or create something for

a specific end. From this point of view, it is possible to raise questions about the justification for

the exercise of violence. Perhaps the purpose justifies the use of violence or perhaps no end

justifies violence.

Therefore, given this definition, a relevant question comes up: is there legitimate violence? For

example, is the State legitimatized in the use of violence to contain cases of anomie? Are citizens

legitimized in the use of violence against an oppressive government? In this framework, we have

to remember the cases in which violent action is explained as a right: either as a legal usufruct of

individuals to claim their rights against a government that eliminates their constitutional

guarantees; or as the justification of the monopoly of violence by the State. In the latter case,

violence becomes an instrument required by the State to ensure the social order of a nation. In

both cases, 'the end justifies the means'.

To illustrate the first case, we could think of Mexico, which has recently been celebrating with

all pomp and pageantry its 1810 War of Independence and the 1910 Revolution. I would venture

to bet that all Mexicans have celebrated with great ceremony these moments in Mexico’s history

which, without a doubt, arose due to a legitimate claim for independence and allowed social and

political mobility. These movements were inevitably violent.

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx also justifies the use of violence as an unavoidable product

of the division of classes created by the instituting of private property. It is then a consequence of

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oppression that the class owner of the means of production exerts over the productive forces of

society. Literally Marx tells us: "the history of all societies that have existed to this day is the

history of class struggles" and "violence is its midwife".

These examples recovered from the history of Mexico and from classical political theory allow

us to assert that the concept of violence was linked to the instrumental use of force as a 'natural'

defense tool, either of individuals to safeguard their lives, or of groups or classes to defend

themselves against their oppressors.

To illustrate the second case, the legitimate use of violence by the State, we can recall here the

Weberian definition of politics as that which holds the monopoly of legitimate violent power.

(Weber, 1956, 28 [2008, 43] ) . In this case, the State, with the aim of stopping private violence

(i.e., anomie), monopolizes violence as an instrument for domination and for strengthening its

authority.

Which brings us to another concept, that of power; more specifically, political power. In his

State, Government and Society, Norberto Bobbio offers the following classification of power:

economic power, which relies on the possession of certain goods or riches; ideological power,

based on the possession of knowledge and the means of persuasion; and finally, political power,

based on the strength and the possession of the means of physical coercion.

I want to recover here the notion of political power, which Bobbio says is based on the

possession of the means of physical coercion. According to this definition of political power, and

following the definition of violence that we viewed at the beginning, it is identified with

violence.

It would seem then that political power has the possibility of exercising violence, physical

coercion, in a legitimate way. This is the thesis that has been held throughout the history of

political theory, resting on the identification between power and violence and grounded on a

prejudice: domination is the central problem of political affairs.

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II

Unlike the brief, and clearly insufficient, glance just offered regarding the concept of violence,

Arendt separates this idea of violence from that of power, clarifying this notion by contrasting it

to a consensual and communicative concept of power. The distinction between power and

violence was already prefigured in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), where Arendt

emphasized the denial of the human through the terror and the silent violence of the

concentration camps. In The Human Condition (1958) the violence characteristic of all

instrumental activity (whose model is the manufacture) is distinguished from action in concert.

Later, Arendt picks up this theme in his essays On Revolution (1963) and "On Violence" (1969).

Her view of this concept is already anticipated in The Human Condition, where Arendt

distinguishes a number of constants that, despite historic changes, accompany the relation of

humans to the world. According to the Arendtian thinking, vita activa manifests itself in three

areas or dimensions of activity: labor, work and action. Labor is related to those activities that

allow us to deal with the needs of life, namely: eating, sleeping, dressing, etc. Through labor

people are not equal but identical, i.e. in this context we lack an awareness of being individual.

Work, on another level, is articulated around man’s activities to produce objects. It is only in the

context of action where activities allow man to develop in the way most characteristic to him,

that is, freely. Action lies strictly opposed to labor, since action always implies a process of

creation that leads to an emancipation of the given through a process of inculturation. A

particular attribute of the human condition corresponds to each of these activities: strength is the

attribute of labor; violence of work; and power of action. Strength is an attribute of man that

derives from his physical capabilities; violence is an extension of strength, characterized by its

instrumental character; and power is the ability of men to act in concert. Power is understood

always as a group exercise, never as individual.

Violence appears conceptualized in the sphere of the human activity of work. For Arendt,

manufacturing, the work of homo faber, always involves an element of violence against nature.

Such violence is understood as means to an end, as manufacturing that follows a model

according to which objects are made. “The end justifies violence done to nature to win material

(…). (Arendt 1998a: 153). Violence is, therefore, the means used by man to build a world of

things. According to this perspective, this world must be a suitable space for action and speech.

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According to the Greek tradition, Arendt favors action and speech over labor and work. She

conceives of them as constituting the core of political activities and deposits in them the dignity

that distinguishes man from animals.

Every individual at the time of his birth has a 'natural' identity; but this is not what makes him

properly human. His appearance in public space will be what provides him with an identity, an

identity as a citizen. Thus, political action is understood as an activity that allows each individual

to build and develop his identity through his actions and speeches; to reveal himself to others as

a subject with its own identity, which should be recognized by them. For Arendt, the human

being is a political being that fully develops its identity within the framework of its existence in

community, as a form of coexistence beyond those determined by nature.

According to this conception of the human condition, action takes place in a public space

understood as a sphere of freedom and equality against the domain of needs that characterizes

the private world. It is in the private sphere where labor and work activities take place. In this

context, delineated in her best-known work, The Human Condition, Arendt presents power as an

attribute of action. As I said earlier, power is the ability of man not only to act but to act in

concert. Arendt affirms that "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted

company; where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are no used to veil

intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish

relations and create new realities." (Arendt 1998a: 200). This conceptualization of power moves

away from the notion of power over the will of others, i.e., it is not understood as domination but

as power - making, as the capacity of a community of people. Unlike the notion of power that we

analyzed above, according to which political power is the ability to dominate based on the

possession of means of physical coercion, Arendt presents a notion of power as a collective

capacity for the attainment of ends.

So, in this book, power is understood as a concerted action for the exercise of civil liberties,

while violence consists in the use of instruments and physical coercion in order to achieve goals,

obtain submission (Kohn 2009). Power originates in plurality, in the public and the common;

whereas violence takes place in the private sphere.

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These ideas about power and violence raised in The Human Condition are explicitly developed in

"On violence" (1970). In this text, she makes an effort to differentiate the concepts of "strength",

"force", "authority", as well as "power" and “violence”, which are normally assimilated

uncritically. She takes over and deepens the opposition between the categories of power and

violence by means of correlating them to other concomitant categories such as force and

domination, control and obedience, and so on. Let's look at this in more detail:

Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long the group keeps together. (Arendt, 1970: 44)

On the other hand, "Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual

entity; it is the property inherent to an object or person and belongs to his character (...) ".

(Arendt 1970: 40)

And she later points out that

Force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved in its terminological language, "forces of nature" or the "force of circumstances" (...) (Arendt 1970: 44)

A less delimited concept is that of authority, whose characteristic is "the undisputed recognition

by those who are asked to obey; not accurate or coercion or persuasion"(Arendt 1970, 45). Of all

of them, violence is distinguished by its instrumental character. “ Phenomenologically, it is close

to the strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for

the purpose of multiplying the natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they

can substitute for it” (Arendt 1970, 46)

All of these distinctions which, as Arendt explains, are not rigid categories, have been

overlooked by political science.

[...] political science [...] does not distinguish among such key words such as "power", "strength", “force”, "authority", and, finally, 'violence' - all of which refer to different, different, phenomena that hardly exist unless they did. [...] The correct use of these words is a question not only of logical grammar, but historical perspective [...] To use them as synonymous not only indicates a certain deafness to the linguistic meanings, [...] but which also has resulted a type of blindness to the realities that correspond to. (Arendt 1970, 43)

These conceptual differences, insists Arendt, can only be captured if we break with the tradition

that has identified power with domination, and that, consequently, has subsumed these terms as

more or less virulent manifestations of an authority. If we conceive power in terms of command

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and obedience; in other word, in terms of domination, then the exercise of force or violence

cannot but appear as an instrument for the achievement or preservation of a domain. Arendt’s

bet is to retrace both concepts from a different perspective.

According to the reading that Arendt offers in this essay, throughout the history of political

theory identification between political power and legitimate violence has been maintained. The

presupposition of this thesis is, according to Arendt, a prejudice anticipated above, namely, that

domination is the central problem of political affairs. By contrast, in her view, the fundamental

question of political affairs is the foundation and institutionalization of a public space that

allows for the exercise of power and political freedom in plurality. As she had already written in

The Human Condition, the only truly human condition is the implementation of freedom in the

exercise of political action, i.e., in public life. So the political should provide the conditions for

action to be able to be deployed in its entire splendor. And the citizen, for his part, must be

ready to contribute actively in the construction of a plural public sphere, taking into account

plurality and responsibility for others. Indeed, political power is the centerpiece of the political;

that is, power understood as the capacity to act together in the public space. So she says in the

following passage from On Revolution:

In distinction to strength, which is the gift and the possession of every man in his isolation against all other men, power comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another. Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are the means by which the power is kept in existence; where and when men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them during the course of any particular act or deed, they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting of a stable worldly structure to house, as it were, they combined power of action. (Arendt 1963: 175)

However, insofar as power flows wherever people gather and act in concert, the condition of

possibility of power is human plurality. Thus, it turns out to be an unstable and unpredictable

phenomenon that depends on temporary agreement, on what Arendt calls "courted consensus".

Power is an end in itself, and is manifested as the protection and promotion of freedom through

consensus. It does not consist in reaching a consensus with a view to achieving certain objectives

previously fixed. Consensus and agreement are ends in themselves. While stating categorically

that power cannot be reduced to an instrument, that it does not have the character of «medium»

available for some «end», she admits that it is undeniable that governments use power to achieve

goals. “But the power structure itself precedes and outlasts all aims, so that power, far from

being the means to an end, is actually the very condition enabling a group of people to think and

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act in terms of the means-end category” (Arendt 1970: 51). Power is an end or good in itself,

which is "(…) inherent in the very existence of political communities" (Arendt 1970: 52).

For Arendt the central problem of politics is the constitution of spaces where man can manifest

himself through action and the word. In this context, she understands that the nature of power is

completely different and even opposed to that of violence. The concept of power, from this point

of view, is closely related to that of legitimacy, as the following quote from Arendt suggests:

"All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and

decays as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them" (Arendt 1970: 41).

Legitimacy will mean inter-subjective agreement.

However, Arendt recognizes the assiduity with which power and violence appear linked. Thus, in

On Revolution, she already works on the distinction between the two concepts in the analysis of

revolutions. In revolutions, she discovers, amidst violent acts (in the French Revolution, in

particular), singular experiences of the "combined power of many" in "the new American

experience and the new American idea of power", in particular (Arendt 1963, 166). In the

American and French revolutions, that "lost treasure" is made manifest, only to be crushed later

on by the centralization of the modern State, by the avidity for sovereignty, and by violence and

terror. She argues that revolutions share the element of violence along with wars. However, she

insists that such factual cohabitation results in what we could understand as a sort of "zero sum":

in the same measure in which power is present, violence will be absent, and vice versa. Violence

appears where the impossibility of action prevents the development of participation. Later, in On

Violence she clarifies: "the present glorification of violence […] is caused by a severe frustration

of the faculty of action in the modern world" (Arendt 1970: 83). But this has led, from her point

of view, to an error, namely, to believe that revolutions can be "realized", that violence can

create a new power and that, for this reason, the definite battle is that over weapons, when the

contrary truth is what is imposed: violence can destroy power but never generate it. Arendt not

only emphasizes the contrary nature of the relation between violence and power, but also points

out that an inversely proportional relation is given between them: when the power that sustains a

Government is large, the violence is strongly reduced, and violence tends to increase when the

Government begins to lose power. Arendt expresses this clearly: "Power and violence are

opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" (Arendt 1970: 56). That is why

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where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. Everything depends on the power behind the violence (Arendt 1970: 49).

To the extent that violence cannot replace power, the differentiated nature of these realities

becomes evident for Arendt. In the next section we will discuss further this dialectic of violence

and power, and show how it may lead to Arendt´s own theory of communicative action.

III

Arendt´s texts show a consistent and radical critique of the identification of power and violence;

so much so, that she stresses at various junctures that violence is impotent for the generation of

power. Furthermore, she argues that politics has been blighted by the fact that authority exhibits

a tendency to instrumentalize violence, and it is precisely such instrumentalization of violence by

authority which deprives people of power. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the mismatch between

the brightness of our political concepts and ideals, and the darkness of our political realities is

largely due to the ostensible use of violence as a mere means to preserve or achieve power. In

contrast, Arendt´s proposed theory of action is rooted in the notion of power through discourse,

in other words, in what I propose to call communicative power. By stressing this notion of

power, there emerges a proper Arendtian theory of communicative action.

It might be objected to this proposal that Arendt never expressed herself in these terms that she

never used the expression 'theory of communicative action'. It could also be argued that Arendt

never developed a theory. While it is true that Arendt certainly had misgivings with mere

speculative reflection, this does not mean that her work cannot be read as a systematic effort to

understand the political. Arendt refused to develop a theory in the traditional sense of a

completely general philosophical system of thought. However, her work is developed through a

network of concepts that make up a system of sorts. It is indeed an unusual system: a web of

concepts that are constantly being subject to revision, tested and modified (Bernstein 1977). It is

just this flexible and constantly changing system which allows her to approach politics assuming

its radical contingency. Like Arendt shows very well, the contingency of the political is precisely

that which traditional political philosophy has not been able to assume. And this is largely due to

the fact that political philosophy has not placed sufficient attention to the vita activa that makes

the political possible. Therefore, as I pointed out in the introduction, and following the Arendtian

model of the practice of philosophy, the task ahead is to concentrate in and always attend human

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experience and the human fact of plurality. Valuable experiences are those that speak of

plurality; those that allow for the creation and preservation of a space in which plurality can

manifest itself; those in which the subjects can reveal their identity through actions and words. 2

In order to gain a clear picture of Arendt´s theory of communicative action, it will be useful to

consider some of Habermas´ reservations vis-a-vis Arendt´s concept of power. As we may recall,

a few years after the publication of On Violence, Jürgen Habermas criticized Arendt´s concept of

violence (Gewalt) on grounds that she detaches it from the phenomenon of power, and thereby

fails to consider the broader phenomenon of domination. Habermas points out that a long

tradition --from Weber to Talcott Parsons-- has paired violence and power as two

complementary aspects of political domination. Thus, Arendt, in Habermas´ eyes, fails to

consider that violence has proved to be an effective means of imposing one´s will on others.

Here´s what Habermas says in Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power (1976):

This could, of course, be construed as if power and violence [Macht and Gewalt] designated merely two different aspects of the same exercise of political domination. The power would mean the consent of the governed mobilized for the sake of collective goals (that is, their readiness to support the political leadership), whereas violence would signify manipulations of resources and coercive means in virtue of which a political leadership reaches and implements normative decisions in order to realize collective goals. (Habermas1983: 172)

Habermas argues that Arendt´s concept of power excludes from the concept of power the

administrative apparatus of the state as well as other aspects of the political process. While

recognizing some affinities between his model and Arendt’s, he exposes the difficulties arising

from what he takes to be her unrestricted identification between power and public opinion, and

argues against Arendt´s radical separation between power and the state apparatus (Habermas

1983: 175, 179-180, 183-185):

Arendt can reduce political power exclusively to praxis, the mutual speech and mutual action of individuals with one another, because she sets off praxis against the apolitical activities of production and labor on one side and of thought on the other." (Habermas 1983: 179)

2 Arendt finds the best manifestation of these experiences in story-telling --understood as a way to represent and understand experiences which create both political concepts and historical events. Such stories, which show the fragments of reality rather than the whole of it, concentrate on historical incidents, anecdotes, biographies and literary works --in those situations and singular gestures that interrupt the movement of daily life. Throughout her life Arendt wrote several short biographies and tragic stories. In her Men in Dark Times (1968) she includes short stories from the life of Lessing, Rosa Luxemburg, Angelo Giuseppe Roncali, Karl Jaspers, Isak Cinesen, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Waldemar Gurian and Randall Jarrell.

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For Habermas, in brief, Arendt operates a reduction of the political sphere, and sustains that in

her view power can be detached from all strategic consideration, and be conceived as an end in

itself that maintains the praxis from which it arises.3 In his reading, this is just what allows

Arendt to separate the idea of power from those of domination and violence, and blinds her to

structural violence. Habermas summarizes his criticisms as follows: “Arendt pays the price of

screening all strategic elements out of politics as ´violence´, severing politics from its ties to the

economic and social environment in which it is embedded via the administrative system, and

being incapable of coming to grips with appearances of structural violence" (Habermas

1983:179).

From the late fifties on through the sixties Arendt was already thinking one of the central ideas

of her theory of communicative action, namely, that discourse is a form of praxis, and that

discourse is the political activity par excellence. In other words, she was pointing at the idea that

communication is oriented towards understanding, in the sense of reaching agreements and

excluding all forms of violence. Hence, while it is true that one can object that Arendt reduces

politics to joint action and speech, this just because she is not conflating two domains which

ought to remain separate, namely, the economy and the administration of the state apparatus, and

politics. This is precisely what allows her to reject structural violence and to keep the scope of

politics away from strategic and instrumental reason.

To see why this responds to Habermas´ objections, let us go back for a moment to some of the

ideas from The Human Condition. It is well-known that Arendt differentiates between three

aspects of vita activa: labor, work, and action; each of these activities corresponds to a condition:

to labor corresponds the biological life determined by processability; to work corresponds

worldliness, that is, the set of artifacts that are projected, a condition is characterized by the

projectability; and to action corresponds plurality, the plural which is a plot of existing

relationships and context characterized by unpredictability. So the thought here is that political

freedom is only possible in a space characterized by unpredictability and plurality: as long as

human beings are plural, diverse, different, they will carry out actions that are unpredictable. At

3Habermas´ critique of the Arendtian notion of power culminated with a strong and apparently devastating indictment of Aristotelianism: “The concept of communicatively engendered power developed by Hannah Arendt can be made into a sharp instrument only if it is dissociated from the theory of action inspired by Aristotle.” (1983: 179)

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the same time, by their unpredictability actions cannot obey the dynamic of means and ends, and

criteria arising from strategic rationality.

Something very different happens with work, whose attribute is violence.4 This attribute is

distinguished by its instrumental character –they are governed by the dynamic means and ends.

Violence is required for the construction of the social world, the world of things. For Arendt, the

world, in contrast to the Earth, is an artificial product manufactured by humans. Animal species

live on Earth; human beings inhabit a constructed cultural world that is “furnished" by us with

objects. The world, in this sense, is a set of artifacts out of the hands of man as homo faber, the

constructor of the world. The world is a world of things that is furnished with appliances, tools,

works of art, social and political institutions. The world offers mortals some objectivity,

continuity, durability and a strength (Arendt 1998a: 160-164) that goes beyond the short duration

of individual lives and that unites the generations together. If there were not a world for humans,

then only the cyclical movements of the metabolism of nature would exist; human beings would

not be individuals with their own biography, but only individuals of a biological species. Hence,

"[t]he implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of

instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end

justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. The end justifies the violence

done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies

destroying the wood" (Arendt 1998a: 153).

Thus, violence acquires its own meaning in the dynamic of means and ends, Arendt does not

reject this function of violence but locates it in the realm of the social, as an attribute of work.

The activity that constitutes the social realm is work, and this, according to Arendt´s proposal, is

not a form of action but fabrication.

Arendt is deeply opposed to the invasion of the space of action --where only speech must

prevail-- by the social --where the relationship between means and ends reigns-- which is

4 Arendt´s criticism of Marx between the end of the fifties and the beginning of the seventies centered on the rejection of the relationship between economics and politics, as Marx thought it. From the critique of Marx, Arendt establishes the distinction between freedom and release, as well as the distinction between the political waiting and the social sphere, replacing the paradigm of work by the paradigm of action in plurality. This offers us the possibility of rethinking the revolutionary ideal supported by the Marxist left.

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characteristic of violence. Such invasion would mean that human affairs are considered with the

same criteria that the things of the world that are fabricated by the homo faber.

The reality of human affairs is very different from the natural objects and from fabricated

objects. Arendt also talks about world in the context of action, in the public domain; this is the

common world, understood as a system of relations, as a web of human relations that is not a

natural product. Neither is it fabricable; it arises among men in their daily coexistence through

actions and words. This ‘among’ or ‘space in the middle of the web of relations’, “lies between

people, and therefore can relate and bind them together. Most action and discourse is concerned

with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are

about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking

agent"(Arendt 1998a: 182). In this space of relations, the relation of means and ends should not

play any role. This common world is the public space, a realm for discourse and action.

In the space of action, the concept of 'world' takes a relational meaning. Human beings are the

human world through action and discourse by establishing relations among themselves. These

relations have their own reality, their own 'objectivity'. This is what Arendt calls "the web of

relationships of human affairs". This common world is not possible in the private realm, which is

dominated by the activities of labor, nor the social, a space dominated by work.

In the second chapter of The Human Condition, Arendt explicitly addresses the distinction

between private and public space by using the historical revision of the Greek polis and the

Roman Republic. There, she says: “The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it

men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. (…) The realm of the

polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these

two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life” (Arendt 1998a:

30 my emphasis). This, freedom and necessity are the elements that distinguish these spheres.

Freedom is possible only in the public sphere, while necessity is linked to the domestic sphere.

This distinction between public and private, says Arendt, corresponds to that between "the

political arena and the home", which appeared for the first time in ancient Greece and continued

until the beginning of the Modern age when it became clouded by the emergence of a third

realm, the "social"(Arendt 1998a: 83). The social removes the borders between the private and

the public; by the social, what was the space for freedom becomes a realm of necessity. The

14

social is an extension of the private so that domestic affairs are now presented in public space.

This brings about that the state becomes a large administrative apparatus for the resolution of

global needs. Then it is produced a commodification of the public sphere and the conversion of

the state in a large market (Rabotnikof 2005: 123).

The rise of the social, according to Arendt, leads to the loss of public space, and with it to the

centralization of power and the atomization of society. The problem is that society has come to

represent the public organization of the process of life. “Society is the form in which the fact of

mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where

the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (Arendt 1998a:

46). In brief, the social has to do with the economy, with production and need, which were

private in the ancient world; however, now the social is collective, large-scale and impersonal. It

is a realm of uniformity rather than that of personal distinction; the social imposes "leveling

requirements", and "complacency". The social contrasts with the plurality and singularity that

had always characterized public life: “society always demands that its members act as though

they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest”

(Arendt 1998a: 39). Society excludes the possibility of the action; it is the realm of the conduct,

where countless and varied rules aimed in their entirety are imposed to normalize to its members,

to instill in them a pattern of conduct. The disappearance of the public sphere, by the rise of the

social, becomes political action in pure technique. Politics becomes in administration, as we have

already said, a large market is made of the state.

The identification of violence and power has as background this reduction of politics, the space

of the action, to the realm of the homo faber, the social space. It is for this reason that it is

inadmissible to Arendt, to identify power and violence. Politics is the realm of the ends; it is

opposed to the technical, and is distinct from the space of work dominated the means-ends

dynamic. “Violence as instrumental has a proper role in human life because it is involved in all

fabrication. (…) But when the mentality of homo faber dominates our thinking and acting, it is

dangerous for two basics reason: it distorts reality (especially the unpredictability and

contingency of human action), and it “legitimizes” violence in political life” (Bernstein 2013: 93)

If we insist on the identification between power and violence, Arendt seems to suggest, public

space runs the risk of being colonized or neutralized by instrumental rationality (Dodd, 2009: 56-

15

57). But public space does not follow instrumental logic; politics is not the realm of the

calculable, but of the action which, as noted above, is constitutively unpredictable and full of

plurality. There lies the essential difference between politics and the political. To this point we

will return later, for now it is necessary to emphasize the traits of unpredictability and

contingency of human action. So let us briefly stress that plurality is the basic human condition

of action; that is, "the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world (Arendt

1998a: 7).

Plurality is the necessary condition, the prerequisite of politics, that which makes action possible.

We can, using the distinction made by Marco Estrada Saavedra, highlight two essential aspects

of human plurality: "uniformity (Gleichartigkeit) and distinction (Verschiedenheit), which, in

turn, are to be classified under the dimension of communicative "understanding" between men.

Arendt discriminates between ontological and active plurality. The former lies in the oneness and

uniqueness of every human being from birth, while the latter makes direct reference to action and

discourse (...)" (Estrada 2007: 130. My translation) Indeed, Arendt perceived in action and

speech the quality of being human of man, since they remind us that we belong to the world. We

live as a full world of a plurality of individuals which are unique and different. This plurality is

always open to the possibility of conflict and dissent. The plurality of the common world, the

political community, pushes us, when we want to act in concert, to agreements. At the same

time, it is inevitable to admit the contingent and fragile nature of human affairs. The political

community is an imperfect, changing world in permanent conflict. Such a world is subject to

uncertainty, instability and the fragility of the action. Hence, politics must assume plurality as an

unstable starting point -- a concept already stressed by Bernstein: “Plurality is the most

fundamental theme in Arendt’s political thinking, and it shapes her concepts of action, natality,

speech, freedom, equality, power, politics, public space, world, opinion (doxa), judgment and

narrative. These concepts form a complex web that defines Arendt’s understanding of praxis”

(Bernstein 1997: 159). Only from the recognition of this plurality may we give meaning and

dignity back to politics.

At this point it can be appreciated that the Arendtian concept of plurality is forgotten by

those conceptions of politics that focus on the notion of domination and equate power and

violence --even if violence was qualified as legitimate. Again recovering Bernstein´s words, we

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can say that “[t]he “story” that she tells in The Human Condition, is a bleak narrative of those

tendencies in modern social life that are leading to a withering away of plurality (and of a

politics based on plurality) (Bernstein 1997: 161).

In that scenario plurality appears in its ontological character, but also as a horizon; plurality in its

active character is an achievement that must always be preserved. Therefore, the time of

uncertainty, contingency should not be eclipsed by the dynamics of strategic reason. "The

Arendtian political space, far from being a space in which what is looked for is the consensus á

la the Habermas, or the elucidation of principles of Justice á la Rawls, is rather the constant

maintenance of that moment of uncertainty and dissent present always in same plurality"

(Sánchez 2005:115-116).

Following the interpretation of Ernst Vollrath "what Arendt has discovered could be called (...)

the 'political difference'; that is, the difference between the politically genuine and politically

perverted politics... "(1995: 45). Thus, the politically genuine is what we can identify with the

political in Arendt. The criterion that allows the authenticity of politics to be measured lies in the

associative, communicative model of politics. This is the associative and communicative

moment that underlies the political. As was already mentioned above, the emphasis is always on

acting by common agreement, acting together. In the public space, a free community wields

power when, through public discussions, promotes and protects not only the welfare of the

community but also its plurality. Politics, in the perverted sense, consists of the set of strategies

that serve the public authorities for the development of the social. Perverted politics follows

bureaucratic, economic, and instrumental forms of rationality; this is the kind of politics which

assumes rational calculation and proceeds from knowledge of causes to practical consequences.

In sharp contrast, Arendt reminds us of the radical contingency of political action. This explains

the displacement of the concept of power from its traditional links with the concept of violence

to its association with action in the public space. The political is the space of public deliberation

and the commonality in plurality.

On the other hand, the reason why politics in the traditional sense is loaded with negative

connotations is that it has become a revolving technique of mere administration of public

resources. The much-debated Arendtian criticism of the political colonization of the social

(Pitkin 1999) can be interpreted as an anti-fundamentalist stance. I agree with the assertion of

17

Oliver Marchart that the social is rejected by Arendt as a sort of foundation. For Arendt, we

cannot accept that the instrumental rationality which permeates the social is understood as a

foundation of the meaning of the politics:

Politics, or, for that matter, the political, cannot be founded on something outside of itself, outside of the in-between space, the space between those who gather among themselves with the purpose of acting. For this reason, the idea of truth should be excluded, for Arendt, from the realm of the political, because it operates as a potential foundation which, ultimately, could interrupt public action and deliberation. (…) all corporate, administrative or bureaucratic logic exactly serves the same function of a foundation, that eventually gives a real character to the politics, which must be kept unfounded, superfluous. (Marchart, 2009: 70. My translation)

The agonistic-associative5 model of politics that I attribute to Arendt is governed by the

impossibility of thinking an ultimate foundation for the political. This political model assumes

the radical contingency of politics. Therefore, it shows the fertility of the Arendtian ideas to

think the emancipatory power of social movements, and the demands of recognition and

participatory citizenship.

Hannah Arendt´s position, then, is very different from the one proposed by Habermas. The

absence of a foundation as a starting point signals a new model of communicative action. At the

same time, it allows us to criticize from its very roots a notion of politics that gives preeminence

to strategic reason. Hence, it is true that there is in Arendt a redirection of the concept of politics

to the ideas of public debate, deliberation and collective action, but it is precisely this redirection

which allows Arendt to undertake a radical critique of structural violence.

What would this new model of politics, this authentic politics, be? Let us remember that when

Arendt was asked to clarify her idea of the "force" that holds citizens together, her response was

to give two images of the public space: on the one hand, a space of appearance, where the

subjects have the opportunity of distinguishing themselves, create their identity and thus remedy

the futility of action and speech; and, on the other hand, the shared common world which endows

objectivity to the relationships among men and women. The public space, under these two

images, allows us to share a world in which, through recognition, we obtain identity, we exist.

Despite her characterization of public space as a common world, she does not appeal to any

notion of consensus for public life; nor to some sort of political community united by a common

5 According to Sheyla Benhabib (1993), the Arendtian agonist model would contrast with a "partnership model", developed by Arendt in her more recent writings, and that would be linked to the idea that public space emerges always and in all places in which «men act in concert». From my perspective, the coexistence of both models is not contradictory.

18

good or by some general will. The ideal we find in her proposal does not require the suppression

of diversity for the sake of unity. She takes the separation of public and private as a defense of

plurality. Furthermore, she conceives citizenship by way of the concepts of plurality and freedom

which constitute the public space. This is the way in which Arendt also retrieves the modern idea

of a republic: the free community of citizens living under the rule of law, a law that is subject to

debate and deliberation. Hence, she is interested in recovering the common world as a political

category against the privatization of public life. This common world is permeated by plurality.

Arendt´s major success is therefore to place political action in the middle of a web of human

relations, so that the realization of the action is necessarily the realization of the human condition

of plurality. “If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is,

was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood”

(Arendt, 1998a: 175-176). The action is only political when it is accompanied by the word

(lexis), in so far as the latter becomes significant praxis. For Arendt, action and speech are

uttermost human capabilities, and they are those that allow the public space to take shape and

renew constantly.

In her essay On Revolution, Arendt reiterates this basic formulation of her theory of

communicative power, emphasizing the horizontal commitments secured by the plurality of

views. There she distinguishes sharply between a social contract and a mutual agreement. On the

one hand, the so-called social contract is signed between a society and its ruler, it consists of a

fictional or imaginary act in which each member cedes her isolated strength and power to an

authority in order to secure her interests; however, far from obtaining a new power, they end up

giving away their real power, and they limit themselves to express their consent to be governed.

On the other hand, “[t]he mutual contract by which people bind themselves together in order to

form a community is based on reciprocity and presupposes equality; its actual content is a

promise, and its result is indeed a 'society' or 'co-association' in the old Roman sense of societas,

which means alliance. Such an alliance gathers together the isolate strength of the allied partners

and binds them into a new power structure by virtue of 'free and sincere promises' "(Arendt,

1963: 170). Hence, everyone sees their own advantage in being attached to others, and therefore

they themselves are linked to all others through "the force of the contract or the mutual promise".

(Arendt: 1963). The power of the individual lies in her capacity to build her world along with

others. Political action and discourse constitute a public space in which agents, in their acting

19

together, reveal who they are and what they want the world to be. Political action is, therefore, an

activity of collective self-revelation (Beiner 1987: 36). Emergence in the public space involves

the construction of an identity that is given by the recognition by others of our uniqueness.

Through action, people become equals not just as formal citizens but as members of a common

world whose identity --a unique identity and, therefore, one that is essentially different that from

one another—can only appear in the public space. What is displayed in the public space is the

uniqueness of the subject in her acting. So Arendt finds a "reward" in political participation,

namely, the recognition of others in public space. Such recognition implies a personal self-

realization in two senses: to make real what is potential --the subject´s ability to start something

new, to act--, and to understand what one really is through the eyes of others with whom one

shares the world.

Arendt´s proposal is oriented by the classical ideal of citizenship, where the intersubjective

treatment of common issues is essential for the life of the members of the community.6 Now, in

the Arendtian ideal republic individuals optimize their opportunities and possibilities, i.e., their

power, in order to acquire reality through the growing power of the community. The power of

the individual lies in her capacity to build her own world, and this power may be unleashed both

for and against that very community. In contrast, the power of the community consists in the fact

that the reflective spectators evaluate the acts and positions of the actors –be it as innovators, as

rule-breakers or as deniers-- giving consent and praise or decrying the actors with criticism and

contempt:

In the interpersonal carrying out of the action, anyone can fail, and if an individual loses or wins it is not only in their hands to decide it, but also in the interactive audience. However, the sovereignty that the autocratic subject requests becomes part of a community which, in its turn, looses all power when it represses with violence the ability to act and the right of the individual to dissent critically (Brunkhorst 2001: 56).

Thus, it is plain that this is a very different conception of politics than the one that proclaims the

compromise between interests as a formula for social cohesion, a compromise whose

formulation is exterior to political action. The bond between citizens that founded on such an

undertaking is quite weak, since the individual only knows the pursuit of self-interest and rejects

6 According to Axel Honneth (1999) there are two main theories on democracy, which are real attempts on political liberalism: one called "procedimentalism" and involves the conception of Habermas, who believes that to reactivate the process of the democratic will formation only needed a procedure justified morally; to the other, "republicanism" and it considers the theoretical construction of Hannah Arendt, it defines it driven to the classical ideal of citizenship, where the intersubjective treatment of common issues is an essential objective of the life of its members.

20

any interference, any obligation that can block her freedom. The illusion that harmony could be

born out of the "free play" of private interests, and that modern society has no need for civic

virtue, has shown to be dangerous: its puts into question the real participation of citizens in

public life, their ability to be free agents. Hannah Arendt manages to conceptualize freedom in

such a way that it overcomes the well-known dichotomy between freedom of the ancient and

freedom of the modern; and it does that in a way that is not limited to the defense of the

individual rights against the State, nor to the sacrifice of the subject on behalf of the community.

The Arendtian model of public space has the great merit of articulating political freedom with

plurality.

In this perspective, the central problem of politics is the constitution of spaces where men and

women are able to manifest themselves through action and word. Hence, communicative praxis

is the core of social and political life. In this context, Arendt understands that the nature of power

is completely different and even opposed to that of violence. The concept of power, from this

point of view, is closely linked to the concept of communicative action. Political power is the

ability to act in concert through the speech. That is why, despite the fact that revolutions may be

founding moments a republic, their failure is in the inability to establish a space for political

power. Indeed, the central thesis of On Revolution is that "what was truly revolutionary of them

was the attempt, which failed repeatedly, to realize the libertatis constituio - the establishment of

a political space for public freedom, in which individuals as free and equal citizens could deal

with the concerns that they shared" (Wellmer 2001: 83). This political space for public freedom,

for the exercise of power, would be possible through a model of direct democracy that Arendt

illustrates with the idea of a system of councils. The defense of direct democracy could be naive

if it is interpreted literally, but one could think of it, with Wellmer, as

a metaphor to refer to a network of institutions, organizations and autonomous or partially autonomous associations in whose bosom something akin to the self-governance of a free and equal people is realized -- free and equal in different ways, with different tasks and different mechanisms to recruit its members. A network whose units may be intertwined both horizontally and vertically, in either joint relationship or dependence. This complex organizational structure can occur both in a federal political system (from local to national) as well as in associations, organizations and institutions of a democratic 'civil society' which are different from the "formal" political institutions. (Wellmer 2001: 92)

Wellmer considers that Arendt refers to two aspects of a possible direct democracy: "both the

political institutions of a federal system, and a network of associations and autonomous or

partially autonomous organizations of a civil society." This idea of participation through a

21

network of institutions and associations, be they formal or informal, allows power to become a

real experience where the "common issues" are, so to speak, physically tangible to the

participants who can autonomously negotiate their own immediate concerns. Interpreted in this

way, political freedom means nothing and has more range than a constitutional guarantee of the

fundamental rights of citizens.

If my reconstruction of the Arendt´s proposal is correct, there is a theory of communicative

action. In this theory, power rests on discourse and is distinct from the violence. Likewise, we

may analyze structural violence according to the distinction between the space created by work,

the social, and the realm of action. In the space of the social, violence has meaning. In the realm

of action, only the common power and the word have meaning.

María Teresa Muñoz

April 1, 2013

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