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contexts. Violence can make things happen in the immediate sense, but it is also the right response, for
instance to the victimization of the innocent. In spite of what might have been expected, Arendt is by no
means a pacifist. She argues that the use of non‐violence as a tactic requires, as its pre‐requisite, that
there already be some space of politics and therefore for power. Ghandi’s campaign, she suggests, could
not have been effective had he been faced with a more purely anti‐political regime, such as Nazi
Germany or Stalinist Russia [121]. In the latter contexts violence would be necessary in order to make
politics possible. Nevertheless, regardless of whether violence may have its uses and justifications in
relation to politics, it should never be conflated with politics itself. For Arendt, at best violence is a short
term ‘solution’. It is in its nature to be so, because the only possible predictive capability we have
regarding the outcomes of violence are its immediate effects – we know that the blow will knock out the
adversary. Beyond that, our capacity to use violence instrumentally is quite limited. [141]
Arendt contra Fanon
Essentially Arendt attacks the two main ways in which Fanon both understands and justifies
violence: as a means necessary to political action and as an organic force or energy that follows its own
logic. In relation to the former, her argument is not that violence is not an instrument per se, in fact
Arendt is quite clear that violence is essentially the enhancement of natural strength through the use of
tools. Nevertheless violence is not politically instrumental for two reasons. Firstly, this is because the
instrumental reasoning that underlies the use of violence in politics is antithetical to politics, since it
identifies politics mistakenly with the achievement of pre‐defined ends. Secondly, this is because those
who confuse violence with power misunderstand the inherently unpredictable consequences of violence.
Particularly in the long term, the means of violence has a tendency to overwhelm the ends for which it is
used. The argument against the identification of violence as a kind of force is more straightforward. The
category of violence hovers somewhere between the categories of work and action in Arendt’s account,
in either case it is bound up with motives and intentions that are not in any sense pre‐determined by the
workings of natural drives or unconscious libidinal energy. Violence is a product of distinctively human
emotions and reason, it is not reactive but intentional.
Convention