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whether reactionary or revolutionary, on both perpetrators and victims. By contrast, Arendt, who seems
at the outset to be more thorough‐goingly resistant to any arguments for the necessity, inevitability or
usefulness of violence, accepts that violence may sometimes by the only way to achieve justice.
Conclusion
Fanon and Arendt begin by offering us alternative theorizations of the relation between politics
and violence. In the case of Fanon, violence is an instrument for the achievement of political ends, and it
is also a libidinal drive natural to all human beings and capable of being channelled for good or ill. In the
case of Arendt, violence in itself is by definition anti‐political. This is because violence, in which
obedience is secured through coercion, is the opposite of power, which is based on free consent. We have
suggested in the discussion of these two theorists’ work that the insights they provide are in some sense
complementary. Arendt’s argument gives us a useful corrective to Fanon’s instrumental and
psychoanalytic claims. Fanon, on the other hand, gives us an equally useful corrective to the abstract and
disembodied way in which Arendt thinks about violence as a tool. We conclude, by suggesting that the
phenomena to which Fanon draws attention in the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, point to a set
of issues about the relation between politics and violence that are not explicitly addressed by either
Arendt or Fanon. These issues are to do with the conditions of possibility of violence as an intelligible
political discourse, issues that remain the same whether the ends towards which violence is directed are
just or not. Both Fanon and Arendt are committed to an ideal of politics without violence, whether in the
form of the post‐colonial, post‐ European internationalism or of an ancient style of republicanism. But, in
the end, both thinkers argue that violence is sometimes the only way in which justice can be done. If this
is so, then it suggests that the conditions of possibility of violence must remain in place, and we must
continue to invest massively in reproducing our capability to engage in violence as a political technique,
even though we know that it cannot work, however noble the end that it serves.
References
Hannah Arendt (1959) The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Hannah Arendt (1973) ‘On Violence’ in Crises of the Republic, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Frantz Fanon (2001) The Wretched of the Earth Preface by J‐P Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington, London:
Penguin Books.
Convention