Violence and Power: Arendt on the Logic of Totalitarianism

This chapter focuses on Hannah Arendt’s claim that sovereignty is not based, as Carl Schmitt maintains, on a collective decision but on collective agreement. The chapter outlines her critique of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s theory of sovereignty to show how she departs from the classic-juridical model, before setting out to reconstruct her own revised version of sovereignty based on an analysis of violence. Noting an ambiguity in the relationship between her earlier writings—notably a number published during the Second World War that hold violence to be an inherently political action and the Human Condition that sees violence, in the form of fabrication, as being constitutive of human action—and her later On Violence in which violence is understood to be instrumental to rather than constitutive of politics, the chapter explains the apparent contradiction through her claim that contemporary society has increasingly fetishized the means of fabrication over the end, a logic that sees all things (including humans) as pure means. To prevent this, Arendt advocates that power and violence be radically opposed. In so doing, however, she insists on an undifferentiated opposition between violence and power that was undermined by her own examples and much later thought.