Hannah Arendt On Violence: A Reappraisal of Her General Theory of Violence
By Seán English
On Violence[1] by Hannah Arendt was first published in 1969 and is in many ways a child of its time, reflecting the issues of the 1960s and questions arising from the cold war, the nuclear arms race and the American war in Vietnam; but it should also be seen as a significant contribution to the debate on the understanding of the question of violence both in human society and in Homo sapiens as individuals. The work reflects the burning issues of the middle part of the twentieth century and is inspired in part by the energies of the student movements from the sixties. Hannah Arendt had also lived through the experience of the Second World War and was aware of the frenzied and systematically organised nature of the levels of violence and terror associated with that conflict. The experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the development of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) overshadowed much of the contemporary debate on the limits of the rational understanding of organised violence in the Age of Science. The strategy of nuclear war was evolving from ‘limited nuclear war’, in which only individual cities were targeted for extermination, to the real possibility of ‘Armageddon’ at a civilizational level.
But Arendt’s analysis of the nature and function of organised violence is as relevant today as ever, and even more so in the age of ‘endless wars’ on terror and numerous conventional wars around the world. In particular, she addresses the challenge and the absurdity of planning wars between nuclear powers. This question is even more relevant today with the failure of almost all the treaties to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. Her book is just over one hundred pages long, including the appendices, and is divided into three untitled sections. Arendt uses a quote from Connor Cruise O’Brien which sums up her own approach to the question of violence where she addresses the ‘debate on the legitimacy of violence in the theatre of ideas’.[2] The basic arguments put forward by Hannah Arendt in her work On Violence can be summarised very simply, but as many people will appreciate, simplicity can be a very deceptive tool. The core of her argument, or at least my interpretation of what Arendt is saying in On Violence, and much of her mature reflection on the subject, is outlined in the following review.
In relation to the justifications and rationalisations that are generally and normatively used to legitimise some forms of violence and delegitimise others, Arendt sets out to show in her book that these traditional justifications and rationalisations are false and duplicitous. She also dismisses the utilitarian arguments that are made for rationalising violence in relation to its efficiency and the effectiveness of the use of violence in any conflict situation. She identifies as false the idea that no alternative or substitute has yet been discovered for the use of violence.
Arendt’s On Violence should not be overlooked by anyone interested in the fundamental debate on the role of violence in human society. The book is full of so many challenging reflections that no summary can do it justice. From that perspective, the book itself must be read and studied rather than the reader resorting to anyone’s interpretation of the arguments and of the debate which she catalogues. One legitimate reason for attempting any interpretation is the need to try and understand how Arendt’s reflections have stood the test of time and to see what we might learn from them over fifty years after the book’s publication. It would seem that the fundamentals of the narratives surrounding and supporting the use of collective violence today have not changed from those used in the past. The same narratives, albeit in more modern interpretations, are used to legitimise, legalise, rationalise and normalise the use of collective violence in human relationships. The default explanatory mode of almost every conflict seems to reset to the binary logic of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ or ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’. In the real world of human-conflict dynamics almost no conflict actually follows that pattern. Bertrand Russell, in his classic work, Justice in War-Time calls this ‘the absurd assumption …that if one side is to blame, the other must be innocent’.[3]
On Violence has no subtitle and its three sections are untitled. For the purposes of this analysis, I have taken the liberty of providing as follows my own description for each of the three sections. In part one, Arendt addresses the general theories that support the legitimisation of organised violence and she identifies the paradoxes inherent in these theories. In part two, she looks at the understanding of violence in relationship to such concepts as power, authority, force and legitimacy. In part three, she scrutinises the nature of human aggressiveness and its relationship to organised violence in social and culture systems. Arendt spends some time in explaining the importance of linguistics and terminology in any attempt at the understanding of the nature of violence. She refers to the early work of Noam Chomsky[4] on the politics of linguistics extensively throughout the book. She also refers to Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence in which he says:
It is not necessary to be a very profound philosopher to perceive that language deceives us constantly as to the true nature of the relationships which exist between things.[5]
What Arendt tries to do in the second part of the book is to perform the almost impossible task of connecting the language to the concepts in some agreed format. She tries to define what she sees as the key concepts that must be understood for the construction of any ‘theory of violence’; concepts such as power, authority, force, legitimacy and other related concepts. For Arendt there were a number of general problems that arise in the definitions approach. No concept stands alone and there are of course no watertight compartments that separate one conceptual definition from another. The concepts that are being defined very often change their meanings when combined with each other. Another problem, and possibly the most important one, as Arendt points out, is the consistent gap that exists between theory and reality. Arendt recognises that
Not many authors of rank glorified violence for violence’s sake; but these few –Sorel, Pareto, Fanon – were motivated by a much deeper hatred of bourgeois society and were led to a much more radical break with its moral standards … .[6]
Violence was and is seen by many reformers as the best and in many cases the only tool for smashing the old order. For some actors violence is also seen as the tool for creating a new society.
Arendt identifies many of the main areas of study that contribute to the understanding of aggressiveness and violence in human and animal behaviour and in particular she looks at what she calls ‘the riddle of “aggressiveness”’.[7] She identifies in this area the work of biologists, zoologists, psychologists, sociologists and many other areas of study. In particular, she highlights the work of Konrad Lorenz whose book, On Aggression,[8] had only recently been published. She looks at the arguments being put forward in the case of what is sometimes termed ‘natural violence’, this concept being based on the theory of instinctual behaviours in the natural world such as the instinctive nutritive and sexual drives. She looks at the debate which focuses on the animal kingdom and which proposes that most ‘natural violence’ is a function of self-preservation, and in that sense, which has the rationale of self-preservation of the individual, the species or the gene. Arendt believes that the study of ‘natural violence’ is useful and that it has made a contribution to a certain extent to the study of organised violence in human society. But its contribution is limited for many reasons, not least because the species Homo sapiens is both the subject and the object of the rational and irrational drives that are part of the process of human violence.
She then goes on to address the question of violence within the debate on the nature of ‘knowledge’ and the concept of ‘progress’. She identifies what she calls ‘The irrational nineteenth-century belief in unlimited progress [which] has found acceptance chiefly because of the astounding development of the natural sciences’.[9] She warns against the accepted belief that the ‘rapid change-process’ unleashed by modern science should be equated with the concept of ‘progress’. She believes that such a ‘rapid change-process’ of scientific technology could have disastrous consequences. This conflict between change and stability is a feature over time of most human cultural organisations and relationships. For Arendt the real danger comes from the power of science and in particular the destructive potential of science in relation to violence: ‘Not only has the progress of science ceased to coincide with the progress of mankind (whatever that may mean), but it could even spell mankind’s end’.[10] In this context, she sees science in all its aspects to be as much a part of the problem as the solution to the fundamental challenges to a better future for humanity – if indeed a future can be guaranteed, given the destructive potential of science. In the same context, she is very critical of modern scholarship and identifies ‘the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.’[11]
In On Violence Arendt identifies and addresses what she calls ‘the preachers of violence’ and their historical and contemporary defence of violence. Some of the individuals whom she mentions do promote the ‘glorification of violence’ but most base their arguments on the functional necessity of violence under certain circumstances and conditions. From Arendt’s perspective, both groups are guilty of just not keeping up with the developments associated with the application of science to the technology of extermination. Writing from within the experience of colonial domination, Franz Fanon may be right to believe that ‘only violence pays’, but for Arendt the question concerns what violence actually pays and what is the cost in terms of human social and cultural welfare? The same question has to be asked of the apologists for violence from nationalist, socialist and imperial experiences and traditions.
Arendt identifies what she understands to be a new faith in violence to bring about progressive social change:
Sartre with his great felicity with words has given expression to the new faith. “Violence,” he now believes, on the strength of Fanon’s book, “like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.”[12]
In this context Arendt identifies the culture of European violence encompassing the works of ‘the preachers of violence’, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel, Franz Fanon and of course Jean-Paul Sartre. Proudhon believed that ‘For the masses, the real Christ is Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon.’[13] Sorel proposed that ‘Violence and war (had) become the leading instruments of civilization because they dedicate men to non-material ends.’[14] Fanon preached that ‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex … and restores his self-respect’[15]
The general arguments that were being used to support the legitimisation and rationalisation of the use of violence when Arendt was writing and in the early part of the twenty first century are the same arguments that can be clearly seen in the ‘Melian Dialogue’[16] as set out in Thucydides history of the Spartan –Athenian war of the fifth century BC. The problem of violence was one that perplexed St. Augustine (who was the subject of Arendt’s dissertation under Karl Jaspers) and who was writing almost one thousand years after Thucydides. St. Augustine squared the circle of violence by Christianising ideas on war and peace from the classical world. The just war theory as it evolved is the example par excellence of the marriage of Greek philosophy with Judeo-Christian theology. Augustine spelt out the concepts that are still the cornerstone of much of the debate today on the question of violence. I think the approach taken by Professor F. H. Hinsley in his Power and the Pursuit of Peace reflects this debate very well:
Every scheme for the elimination of war that men have advocated since 1917 has been nothing but a copy or an elaboration of some seventeenth-century programme – as the seventeenth-century programmes were copies of still earlier schemes. What is worse, those programmes are far more widely accepted as wisdom now than they were when they were first propagated. Nor is this the full extent of our stupidity.[17]
On the very first page of her book, Arendt sets out the core of the problem as she sees it:
The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.[18]
Like most of her contemporaries, Arendt sets the framework for her examination of violence within the European Enlightenment tradition. The very foundation stones of this tradition are set within the parameters of ‘rational analysis’ and ‘logical argument’. Within this narrative lies the paradox of violence that Arendt identifies. For example, the concept of ‘nuclear deterrence’ must be seen as the ‘Emperor with no Clothes’. She identifies what she calls the ‘obvious insanity of this position,’ but she sees no simple answer or easy way out of the paradox. But this is the paradox that any general theory of violence must address or the theory itself is worse than useless. What she is asking is how is it possible to rationalise the irrational. Arendt is not the first person to address this question but it is still a central question of the paradox. How can rational men and women adopt or support policies on nuclear extermination that should be seen as totally irrational? According to Arendt, the logical flaws in the arguments that are used to support weapons of mass destruction and extermination of all sorts are so glaringly obvious that she is amazed that people accept these arguments.
Scientific developments in the technology of destruction and extermination have exposed the irrationalities in the basic arguments of the just war theory and other theories for justifying and rationalising violence. The question is, how long will it take for this understanding to become effective in the affairs of Man? As others have already asked, will war put an end to Mankind before Man can put an end to war? The jury is still out and the verdict may well be part of the sentence. Arendt starts by assuming that war in any rational sense is obsolete – at least among the nuclear powers. She argues that war is still rationally possible only in ‘the affairs of underdeveloped countries’ that have no nuclear or biological weapons. So, she then asks, why is this fact not accepted by those, particularly in the western world, who use logic and reason in their analysis of war and violence? She specifically criticises those
scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government… . The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough “to think the unthinkable” but that they do not think [my italics].[19]
This is just one of the logical flaws, according to Arendt, in the arguments of those who still support the organised violence of war in the Age of Science.
It is not just nuclear weapons that her analysis should apply too. One of the key arguments that is made in On Violence is that once science is applied to the technology of extermination and of violence generally the problem becomes a zero sum game with potentially genocidal outcomes. It is what Arnold Toynbee called, in his classic work, A Study of History,[20] ‘The Suicidalness of Militarism’. The level of sophistication of the arguments for war only hides the string of non-facts on which they are built. This is the worst form of pseudo-science. Arendt identifies the dangers of putting forward as scientific, arguments for war which are based on ‘pompous pseudo-science theories’, which, she suggests, would be humorous if they did not have the potential to be so tragic.
Arendt identifies and acknowledges ‘the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs’. But according to her arguments, there is a great shortage of real critical analysis of the role and function of violence in human society in the Age of Science:
No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs, and it is at first glance rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for special consideration.[21]
She contrasts the approach taken by Carl von Clausewitz in his classic analysis, On War,[22] with the approach taken by Engel’s in much of his writing. She rejects what she calls these ‘nineteenth century formulas’. Arendt believes that the old arguments about the relationship between war and politics or between violence and power have become inapplicable in the post-second-world war era. These theories are not to be dismissed entirely but the establishment of the military-industrial-labour complex reflects new realities on the ground. Engel’s definition of ‘violence as the accelerator of economic development’ cannot be entirely ignored. Mao Tse Tung’s belief that ‘Power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ is still a very good working theory for most revolutionaries and reactionaries. On the other hand, Marx clearly relegated violence to nothing more than a secondary role in revolutionary change. For Marx it was ‘the contradictions inherent in the old society brought about its end’. According to Marx, the emergence of a new society would be preceded, but not caused, by violence. Both governments and revolutionary groups could use violence to win particular battles, but the war would be won or lost in accordance with different criteria.
In trying to outline and explain any particular theory of human social phenomena it is important to have some agreement on the relationship between ‘the means and the ends’ and ‘the cause and the effect’. As Arendt sets her analysis of violence within the tradition of the Enlightenment the ‘means-ends’ and ‘cause-effect’ debates are one of the central paradoxes for her.
The very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-ends category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affair, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it.[23]
Arendt believes that in human affairs the means-ends debate is always open to unpredictability. The ends are always in danger of being overwhelmed by the means. But she believes that once you introduce violence into the debate then it becomes totally unpredictable:
Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end product of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.[24]
Within the traditional rationalisations and justifications of violence, the dangers from the use of violence, particularly within a cultural context, have been almost totally ignored or have only been given a cursory analysis. Even Arendt, while identifying the problem, gives it only a brief analysis. She states ‘the danger of violence, even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end’.[25]
The Paradoxes of Rationality
One of the questions that Arendt addresses in this study is what has made Homo sapiens the most aggressive and dangerous animal on the planet? The answer according to Arendt is that Man is the most dangerous animal because he is an ‘Animal Rationale’ and it is the use of reason that Arendt says makes us, as a species, ‘dangerously irrational’. Rational Man can turn the role of ‘natural violence’, with its life-promoting functions, into something which is characterised by self-destruction and devoid of any life-promoting function. Under the study of ‘natural violence’, Arendt accepts the role of aggression, rage, frustration, etc, and the violence that springs from them, as part of the natural ingredients of the human psyche. She says
In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes—–not always—goes with it belong among the “natural” human emotions [my italics], and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him.’[26]
Arendt accepts that ‘To resort to violence when confronted with outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of its inherent immediacy and swiftness.’[27] She also accepts that some of the characteristics of violence have an attraction for people everywhere and that violence has an intoxicating spell that Man repeatedly falls under.
To sum up her argument on this part of the question of violence, it is possible to say that she recognises certain positive functions of ‘natural violence’ however defined. This natural violence has a positive function in self-preservation both intraspecies and interspecies and has on balance a life-promoting function. Arendt is not the first to argue the importance of such a distinction but many of the theories on human violence seen to have a problem with it. When we come to the analysis of human violence within its cultural context, we must recognise that any theory of natural violence will only have a very limited creditability. Even at the level of natural violence there would seem to be dichotomy between ‘rational violence’ and ‘irrational violence’. The rationale for violence is basically its function in self-preservation. But in human social relationships one person’s rationality may well be another person’s irrationality.
Another one of the questions that Arendt addresses in general terms is the following: Is it possible to trace and identify the evolution of violence from its natural and primitive functions to the cultural manifestations of violence that had become so widespread in the twentieth century? Arendt seems to believe that it is possible and useful for our understanding of violence to try and identify some middle stage in the evolution process. War is the basic institutional form of traditionally organised violence. In historical terms war fighting and related cultural concepts have been seen as the creator and defender par excellence of the statue quo. History has been generally written on the assumption that war is one of if not the major form of human activity. Quincy Wright in his classic A Study of War[28] identified many of the functions of war in modern society.
The genocidal nature of many of the conflicts of the twentieth century should be, according to Arendt, a wake up call for a more fully comprehensive understanding of human violence. Arendt is critical of the nihilist approach taken by Sartre and others, and she is critical of the kind of Hegelian explanation Sartre uses for his espousal of violence, illustrating Sartre’s view in his own words: ‘Need and scarcity determined the Manicheistic basis of actions and morals…[and this] must manifest itself in an antagonistic reciprocity between classes.’[29] Arendt summarises many of the arguments proposed for understanding the phenomena of violence and the arguments that try to justify the use of violence in human society. She calls them ‘apologies for violence’ and believes that many of the explanations actually go back to antiquity and are merely glossed by some modern interpretations. Some of the explanations are of course relatively new and are based on the knowledge arising from the new sciences of biology and psychology among others. Arendt is not that impressed by the newness of the thinking, for she says ‘this seemingly so novel biological justification of violence is again closely connected with the most pernicious elements in our oldest traditions of political thought’.[30]
Arendt is very critical of many, if not most, of the general theories of violence, both historical and contemporary. Nietzsche may have thought that he had discovered something new when he declared violence as a life promoting and creative force. The justifiers of violence on biological grounds felt that they were on sure ground when they could appeal to ‘the undeniable fact that in the household of nature destruction and creation are but two sides of the natural process …’ . [31] Many of the political philosophies of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries saw violence as an unfortunate but necessary harbinger of social change and social progress. At the same time, a new elite, a new priesthood of power under the general name of scientist, was emerging and these were making their contribution to the question of violence.
Arendt holds this new priesthood elite of scientists responsible for creating what must be the greatest paradox of all as she says they have created ‘the real possibility of constructing a doomsday machine and destroying all life on earth’.[32] Oppenheimer and his gang of scientific warriors were not driven by any of the demented ideologies of the twentieth century and they generally could not be considered evil individuals. Oppenheimer had, it would seem, some sense of humour when he quoted the famous lines from the Bhagavad-Gita ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’. But the Cuban missile crises and the other crises of the cold war instilled in Arendt and in some of her contemporaries the belief that the old explanations or apologies for violence were childishly irrelevant, just as Albert Einstein had already argued. Einstein was very clear in his thinking about this when he said,
the developments of science and technology have determined that the peoples of the world are no longer able to live under competing national sovereignties with war as the ultimate arbitrator.[33]
Arendt and her contemporaries may not have been fully aware of the omnicidal nature of a thermonuclear war because the scientific theory of the nuclear winter only came later. But Arendt went to the top of the mountain and she clearly saw the utter absurdity of playing with doomsday machines. These developments gave a whole new meaning to Toynbee’s concept of ‘the suicidalness of Militarism’[34]; there are very few historical precedents for creating an ideology of suicidal terrorism. All the benefits and possibilities of the new scientific civilization would be of little use when compared with the profoundly nihilistic refusal to face up to the dangers of applying science to the technology of destruction. It seems that maybe Marx was right after all, that every society and every civilization has the seeds of its own destruction built into it.
There is no shortage of evidence to show how instrumental violence seems to be in bringing about change or defending the status quo. Arendt acknowledges, and has little doubt, that violence pays in the sense that it gets results. But she points out that ‘the trouble is it [violence] is that it pays indiscriminately’.[35] When you opt for violence, you are writing a blank cheque on fate. Arendt accepts that ‘The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.’ She believes that while violence can sometimes guarantee change it can never guarantee what type the changes might be. Most violent action is irreversible and a return to the status quo is always unlikely.
The Suicidalness of Militarism and the Zero Sum Game
Arendt argues that war in any rational sense is obsolete – at least among the nuclear powers. She argues that war is still rationally possible only in the affairs of underdeveloped countries that have no nuclear or biological weapons. So, she then asks, why is this fact not accepted by those, particularly in the western world, who use logic and reason in their analysis of war? It is not just to nuclear weapons that her analysis should apply. One of the key arguments that is made in On Violence is that once science is applied to the technology of extermination (of violence) the problem becomes a zero sum game. It is what Arnold Toynbee called in his classic work, A Study of History, ‘the Suicidalness of Militarism’.Toynbee argued that the very creative forces that are essential for the creation and establishment of countries and empires can undergo what he calls a sinister transformation from constructive to destructive agents. He identifies the cultural, the economic, the military, the spiritual, the political and all the other ingredients that are the driving forces of history. In his analysis of the suicidalness of militarism, Toynbee states the case for his belief that it is the military forces/ideology that consistently undergo the sinister transformation from creative to destructive agency.
The military prowess which a society develops among its frontiersmen for its defence against external enemies undergoes a sinister transformation into the moral malady of militarism when it is diverted from its proper field in the No-man’s-land beyond the pale and is turned against the frontiersmen’s own brethren in the interior.[36]
One of the major driving forces of this change is what Toynbee calls ‘The Intoxication of Victory’.[37]
In 1951, when Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism,[38] her general analysis of organised violence proceeded in accordance with the following logic. The appalling levels of violence of the first half of the twentieth century, in particular in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, could not be understood within the context of any traditional analysis. These ‘manifestations of evil’, as she called them, represented an unprecedented form of terror. She believed that terror was no longer a means to an end but an end in itself. The problem was that these ideologies had used logical argument to justify their ideologies. According to the Nazis, the ‘Laws of Nature’ dictate that the degenerate races should be used by superior races for whatever utilitarian function necessity required. According to the Communist ideologies, the ‘Laws of History’ would logically see the eventual triumph of a classless society. But this new society could only come about with the destruction of whatever counter-revolutionary elements were seen as a threat.
In 1963, when she published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,[39] Arendt reexamined some of her own ideas on the role of hate and ideology in the culture of violence and she raised some controversial issues. In one sense her conclusions in this work are very bleak. If the type of radical evil that individuals can inflict upon other individuals has no real meaning that the rational human mind can understand, then that is a very bleak picture. In On Violence, Arendt implicitly recognises certain aspects of human nature that should be seen as a key factor in any analytical approach to the understanding of violence. We must be aware of and accept the flawed nature of the human personality and the dual nature of the individual rooted as we are in both good and evil. This theory of the flawed nature of the individual complicates our narrative of any particular event or set of events. Arendt believes that it is perfectly legitimate for an individual to hate evil, such as the evil of the Nazi’s ideology, but it must be realised that hatred, and the sense of righteousness that sometimes goes with it, is probably the most efficient tool for distorting facts and creating inverted thinking.
What are the implications and the conclusions that can be taken from Arendt’s approach to the question of violence? There are, in my analysis, two important interrelated sets of implications. The first set of implications of her belief is the following: Arendt believes that no breakthrough in our understanding of violence will be possible unless and until we face up to the false justifications and false rationalisations that are central to our cultural narratives. The second set of implications arise from the narratives we tell ourselves about war and violence: for example, the mega-narrative we tell ourselves about the Second World War as a crusade of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ is false. This matters, because most of the justifications that are given by political leaders and their ideologists for the pursuit of the culture of violence in the second part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first century are based on these genuine but false beliefs in such simple mega-narratives.
The Limits of Hypocrisy
The Dangers of the ‘Banality of Goodness’
Hannah Arendt should be seen as one of the great political philosophers of the twentieth century. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she identified a concept which she called ‘The Banality of Evil’. This concept was partly associated with the responsibility of any individual in a system and bureaucracy that contributed to the mass murders of countless individuals. ‘The Banality of Evil’ concept created more than its fair share of criticism, but it did open up the debate concerning the responsibility of individuals within any system of administration and bureaucracy towards the end result of that administration. She questioned the nature of the responsibility of citizens not involved in the political administration and of those who were not directly supporting its ideology. She broadened the debate to include the question of responsibility and accountability of the citizens of any country, even those not directly involved in the policies and procedures of mass murder and genocide. The concept of ‘The Banality of Evil’ did broaden the debate on the culture of violence into areas that were uncomfortable for those who held to the more traditional views of the binary logic of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The legitimacy of the debate that she initiated with the concept of ‘The Banality of Evil’ has stood the test of time.
The ‘Banality of Good’
It may be useful to extend the concept and the analysis of ‘The Banality of Evil’ to include the concept of ‘The Banality of Goodness’ to try and explain how so many ‘good’ individuals can support and justify the genocidal and ecocidal nature of modern warfare. One of the most recent examples of the real dangers of ‘The Banality of Goodness’ can be seen in the political and media response in Europe to the war in Ukraine. Almost every political leader and mainstream media outlet is supporting a military solution to the conflict with Russia ‘whatever it may take’, regardless of the cost to the Ukraine people; and whatever the danger of the conflict spreading either accidentally or intentionally into a nuclear confrontation. It would seem that the enormous devastation and the depravities associated with the Second World War have been forgotten or misunderstood, or are being replaced by yet another utopian set of beliefs in the utility of war. Within this context, European cultural narratives have rejected Auschwitz and Treblinka but embraced Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[40]
One possible explanation of this is that European culture is still suffering from some deep form of post-traumatic dysfunctionality. One of the central sources of this dysfunctionality can be traced back to the appalling levels of frenzied and systemic violence associated with the Second World War. The organised mass murder of civilians by all sides in the conflict was bound to have a traumatic effect on the first generation of survivors of the conflict. The challenge facing the survivors was to try and explain and understand the disintegration of some of the most fundamental of human principles and moralities. The default narrative that evolved was that the war in all its aspects was a conflict of ‘good’ against ‘evil’. This narrative fulfilled a number of important psychological and political functions for the post-war generation. But the narrative of the ‘good’ against the ‘evil’ was partly built on the foundations of hypocrisy that would come back to be problematic for the security of future generations of Europeans. This false narrative of the ‘good war’ has been put to the test in the European response to the conflict in Ukraine. The supporters of the ‘good war’ narrative pumped up with various levels of self-righteousness are creating the conditions for yet another disastrous European-wide genocidal and ecocidal war. One of the main problems arises from the fact that European cultural narratives have never come to the realisation that modern warfare is genocidal and ecocidal in nature.
The narrative of a war of ‘good’ against ‘evil’ satisfies a number of elementary human requirements. In this type of narrative structure, it is very easy to identify a ‘scapegoat’. The ‘scapegoat’, and its associated characteristics, then becomes the default narrative of explaining the past and of justifying the present. The standard narrative of the Second World War identifies Nazism and its demented ideologies as the ‘scapegoat’ which is then used to prevent the critical analysis of the realities and extent of the violence used by all sides in that conflict. The Second World War was a total disaster for the millions and millions of individuals who were slaughtered in that war. The end result of the war was the creation and development of genocidal and ecocidal thermonuclear weapons. These weapon systems were and are potentially so destructive that they are a direct threat to all life on the planet. The narrative of the ‘good war’ is fundamentally flawed and this narrative is being used to justify and rationalise the genocidal and ecocidal weapons of the modern war system.
The Crises of Hypocrisy
Arendt identifies the critical role of hypocrisy in the debate on ‘the legitimacy of violence in the Theatre of Ideas’.[41] She takes up the argument from the French Revolution that the understanding and awareness of hypocrisy, not of injustice, was one of the keys to creative and dynamic attempts to legitimise violence:
The French moralists … saw in hypocrisy the vice of all vices and found it ruling supreme in “good society”, which somewhat later was called bourgeois society.[42]
The war in the Ukraine has exposed the total hypocrisy of the so-called Western democracies in relation to the legitimacy of the use of organised violence in critical conflict situations. The exposure of this hypocrisy will have long-term detrimental effects on the validity and the integrity of the very values promoted by Western democracies in the global context. This double standard is of course not new. It was a question that perplexed Hannah Arendt in her later work and in particular in her explorations in On Violence. The war in the Ukraine is not the first war in Europe since the end of the Cold War but it has all the ingredients of and the potential to be a war that will escalate out of the control of any of the so-called ‘masters of war’. Most European politicians and the mainstream media have come to call the war in the Ukraine this ‘horrible war’. The problem with this description is in the attempt to try to clearly distinguish this ‘horrible war’ from the ‘non-horrible wars’ that are taking place at the same time. The same politicians and media have been very quick to condemn the ‘war crimes’ associated with the Russian invasion. Again, the problem is that there are probably no ‘wars’ that do not have ‘war crimes’. In most wars, war crimes are committed by both sides at different levels of intensity.
In the final analysis, my belief is that the twentieth century has seen a significant evolution in the debate on the nature of war and peace and on the nature of violence and non-violence, and I believe that Hannah Arendt has contributed significantly to that debate. The real possibility of human society transcending collective violence and the real possibility of individuals being able to resolve conflict without the resort to violence have begun to be critically and scientifically examined. But it has to be admitted that the practical application of the knowledge arising from this examination has not yet resulted in any significant reduction in the general level of structural or organised violence. The most, or the least, we can say is that those who advocate the functional nature of war and the utilitarian reality of violence are now on the defensive. The very foundations on which war and violence have traditionally been rationalised and justified have been critically undermined and Hannah Arendt has played an important role in identifying these very positive developments.
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence, Harcourt Brace: New York, 1969:1970.
[2] Ibid., p. 79.
[3] Bertrand Russel. Justice in War-Time, Chicago, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1917, p. 125.
[4] Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, New York: Random House, 1969.
[5] Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence, trans T.E. Hulme & J. Roth, New York: Dover 2004, p. 251
[6] On Violence, p. 65.
[7] Ibid., p. 59
[8] trns Marjorie Latzke, London: Methuen, 1966.
[9] On Violence, p. 29.
[10] Ibid, p. 30.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 20.
[13] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Philosophy of Misery, London: Kessinger, 2004.
[14] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E Hulme, London Unwin and Allen 1915
[15] Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington, London: Pelican, 1983. ()
[16] Cf. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, New York: Basic Books, 1977, p. 5.
[17] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963, p. 3.
[18] On Violence, p. 3.
[19] Ibid., p. 6.
[20] A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D. C. Somervell, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987, p. 336.
[21] On Violence, p. 8.
[22] Ed. Anatol Rapoport, London: Penguin, 1968.
[23] On Violence ,p. 4.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., p. 80.
[26] Ibid., p. 64.
[27] Ibid., p. 63.
[28] 2nd edn, abridged by Louise Leonard Wright, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
[29] On Violence, p. 90, quoting Sartre from Critique of Dialectical Reason in Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950–1960, eds R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper, New York: Vintage Books, 1964, p. 174.
[30] Ibid., p. 74.
[31] Ibid., p. 75.
[32] Ibid., p. 74.
[33] Einstein On Peace, eds Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, London: Methuen, 1963, p. 407.
[34] Arnold J. Toynbee A Study of History, vol. IV, London: Oxford University Press, 1939, page 521.
[35] On Violence, p. 80.
[36] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D. C. Somervell, London: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 336.
[37] Ibid., p. 349.
[38] Orlando: Harcourt, 1976.
[39] London: Penguin, 1994.
[40] Cf. Desmond Fennell, The Postwestern Condition, London: Minerva Press, 1999.
[41] On Violence, p. 79.
[42] Ibid., p. 65.
