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lindseympeterson 's review for:
On Violence
by Hannah Arendt
This was a really great work of political theory by Arendt. It explores violence, mostly through the lens of the 1960s when she was writing this book. It looks at the student rebellions across the world, in both democracies and communist countries. The coincidence of the uprisings is interesting, and she posits that they are both protesting for the same reason, albeit in different manifestations. Students around the world were looking for freedom. The students in communist countries were looking for freedom to express themselves through both speech and action and thereby have an effect on the processes and progress of their respective countries. The students in the Western democracies were protesting their lack of freedom in action. They protested the lack of agency they felt. Both sets of students felt impotent and unimportant, as if they entirely didn't count, and decided to protest against it.
Some of the most impacting quotes for me:
"Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise. Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage, and this reaction by no means necessarily reflects personal injury, as is demonstrated by the whole history of injury, as is demonstrated by the whole history of revolution, where invariably members of the upper classes touched off and then led the rebellions of the oppressed and downtrodden."
"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance... Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
"Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime is the best excuse for doing nothing."
"Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence by definition because it objects to natural organic facts - a white or black skin - which no persuasion or power could change; all one can do, when the chips are down, is to exterminate their bearers. Racism, as distinguished from race, is not a fact of life, but an ideology, and the deeds it leads to are not reflex actions, but deliberate acts based on pseudo-scientific theories. Violence in interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not "irrational"; it is the logical and rational consequence of racism, by which I do not mean some rather vague prejudices on either side, but an explicit ideological system."
"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."
I'm thinking about more right now, but I haven't found the best way to express it yet. I want to write about the way the book made me think differently about how Americans were celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, and what this says about us and the war on terror. So I'll probably be editing this in the future to add some about this, using a few of the quotes above, and maybe some others.
Some of the most impacting quotes for me:
"Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise. Only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage, and this reaction by no means necessarily reflects personal injury, as is demonstrated by the whole history of injury, as is demonstrated by the whole history of revolution, where invariably members of the upper classes touched off and then led the rebellions of the oppressed and downtrodden."
"Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance... Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it."
"Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime is the best excuse for doing nothing."
"Racism, white or black, is fraught with violence by definition because it objects to natural organic facts - a white or black skin - which no persuasion or power could change; all one can do, when the chips are down, is to exterminate their bearers. Racism, as distinguished from race, is not a fact of life, but an ideology, and the deeds it leads to are not reflex actions, but deliberate acts based on pseudo-scientific theories. Violence in interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not "irrational"; it is the logical and rational consequence of racism, by which I do not mean some rather vague prejudices on either side, but an explicit ideological system."
"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."
I'm thinking about more right now, but I haven't found the best way to express it yet. I want to write about the way the book made me think differently about how Americans were celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden, and what this says about us and the war on terror. So I'll probably be editing this in the future to add some about this, using a few of the quotes above, and maybe some others.