On Violence
Arendt's 1970 long essay distinguishing power, force, strength, authority, and violence — and arguing that violence is the antithesis of power, not its highest expression
Tradition: Twentieth-century political philosophy
Violence is not power's highest expression but its substitute when power has failed
On Violence is Arendt's 1970 long essay (originally a 1969 New York Review of Books article), responding directly to the 1968 student movements, the Vietnam War, and the wave of left and right theorists (Sartre, Sorel, Fanon, Marcuse) who treated violence as a creative political force. Its central thesis: power, force, strength, authority, and violence are not synonyms; they are distinct political concepts, and the failure to distinguish them has corrupted twentieth-century political thought. Power is the human ability to act in concert; it is rooted in the consent and engagement of those who exercise it together. Violence is instrumental — it requires means (weapons, organisation) and works through coercion; it can destroy power but cannot create it. The slogan that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" reverses the truth: power is what makes the gun and the soldier obey. The essay was Arendt's last major political publication before The Life of the Mind and is the most influential statement of her distinction between power and violence in twentieth-century political theory.
Author
Editions cited
- "Reflections on Violence," New York Review of Books, Feb 27, 1969; expanded book On Violence (Harcourt Brace, 1970); reprinted in Crises of the Republic (Harcourt Brace, 1972)
School Embodiments
The essay's method — careful conceptual distinction between power, force, authority, violence, and strength — is phenomenological in the precise mid-century sense Arendt learned from Heidegger and Jaspers.
"To speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it." (On Violence, sec. II)
The argument depends on identifying the real generative mechanisms of political action — what actually produces stable collective capacity vs. what merely simulates it.
"Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy." (On Violence, sec. II)
The treatment of action as the distinctively human capacity through which freedom appears in the world is Arendt's standing position, here applied to the difference between acting together (power) and acting on (violence).
"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." (On Violence, sec. II)
The book's implicit rejection of revolutionary millenarianism — the fantasy that violence can purge and create a new society — is continuous with a liberal moral-political stance.
"To resort to violence when confronted with outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of its inherent immediacy and swiftness. But the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world." (On Violence, sec. III)
The instrumental analysis of violence — it has means and ends, it can succeed or fail, it leaves predictable residues — is pragmatist in shape.
"Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues." (On Violence, sec. II)
Arendt's critique of Sartre, Fanon, and the New Left treatment of violence as creative anticipates aspects of postmodern critique of revolutionary mythologies — though Arendt herself was a classical republican.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world." (On Violence, sec. III)
The careful definitional work — power, force, authority, strength, violence as five distinct concepts — is rationalist in its commitment that clear thought can clarify political life.
"It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as 'power,' 'strength,' 'force,' 'authority,' and, finally, 'violence.'" (On Violence, sec. II)
Internal Tensions
Critics on the left (especially Fanonians and theorists of decolonisation) argued that Arendt's position underestimates how the violence of the colonised against colonial regimes can be politically creative. Critics on the right argued that her power/violence distinction blurs in cases (counter-terrorism, state authority over criminals) where they cannot be separated in practice. The essay's influence on subsequent theorists of nonviolence (Sharp, Chenoweth) is uncontested.
I. Time
The contemporary moment of the late 1960s — Vietnam, the student movements, the Black Panthers — as the political-historical occasion of the essay.
Attributes
II. Space
The political space — the polis — in which power as collective action becomes possible; violence works in a different (instrumental, hierarchical) space.
Attributes
III. Matter
The materiel of violence (weapons, bureaucracy, military organisation) vs. the immaterial-but-real fabric of consensual political action.
Attributes
IV. Observer
The political agent who acts in concert — power's subject is "we," violence's subject is "I-against-them."
Attributes
V. Energy
The energies of collective political action vs. the coercive energies of instrumental violence — Arendt insists they are different in kind.
Attributes
VI. Information
The political distinctions between power, force, authority, strength, and violence — the essay's diagnostic vocabulary.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How On Violence resolves each dilemma
48 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 6 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 9 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.