Violence

Philosophy → Political & moral philosophy → Cross-disciplinary concept

The stakes Violence is the blind spot of all political thought: at once what social order claims to suppress (law against brute force) and what it is founded on (the state monopolizes legitimate coercion). To think about violence is to confront an insoluble question: can it be legitimate? Is there a violence that founds the law, and thus a zone where force and justice merge? The stakes are not merely descriptive (what is violence?) but normative (when, if ever, is it justifiable?) — a decisive question for war, revolution, punishment, and even the artistic representation of horror.

History of the concept

Antiquity — force and the city For the Greeks, bia (brute violence) is opposed to peithô (persuasion) and dikè (justice). Plato (The Republic, 4th century BCE) founds the just city on reason, which must master the “spirited” (irascible) part of the soul: violence there is the sign of a failure of logos. Challenged by Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513), for whom the prince must know how to “be both fox and lion”: force is not a flaw in politics but one of its necessary instruments.

Modernity — the monopoly and the contract

Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651): in the state of nature, the war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) makes life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; the social contract transfers everyone’s violence to a sovereign. Challenged by Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762), for whom the state of nature is not violent but peaceful — it is society and property that create violence, not the reverse.
Max Weber (Politics as a Vocation, 1919): the state is “the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Challenged by Pierre Clastres (Society Against the State, 1974): Amerindian societies without a state show that a social order can hold together without a monopoly of violence — power is not necessarily coercive.

The 20th century — radical critique

Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence (1921): distinguishes law-making violence (which institutes an order) from law-preserving violence (the police, which maintains it); every law is born of a violent act that it then masks. Challenged by Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action, 1981), for whom legitimacy can arise from rational discussion (“communicative action”), rather than from a concealed founding violence.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970): violence is NOT power, it is its opposite; power arises from concerted action, violence emerges when power collapses. Challenged by Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, earlier but targeted by Arendt): anticolonial violence is, on the contrary, creative — it “de-alienates” the colonized and founds a new people.

Main theses

1. Violence is what legitimate order confiscates (Weber) The state does not suppress violence: it reserves its exercise to itself; all private violence becomes “crime,” all state violence becomes “public force.”

Example: the French Revolution shifts justice from the private sphere (vengeance, the duel) to the public sphere. The abolition of seigneurial courts (1789) and the institution of the guillotine (1792) illustrate the Weberian centralization — only the state now kills, and “legally.”
Counter-argument: Foucault (Discipline and Punish, 1975) shifts the thesis — modern power actually abandons the spectacular ordeal of torture for diffuse discipline; violence becomes surveillance, not execution.

2. Power and violence exclude each other (Arendt) Where pure violence reigns (terror, tyranny), political power has already vanished; a regime that holds only through force has lost its legitimacy.

Example: the Prague Spring (1968) — Soviet tanks crush the reform but produce no allegiance; the regime holds on by force alone until its collapse without major violence (the fall of the Wall, November 9, 1989), proof that power had already ceased to exist in people’s minds.
Counter-argument: Mao Zedong (“political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” 1938) — the exact opposite thesis, openly held: it is armed violence that founds and guarantees political power.

3. There exists a masked founding violence (Benjamin) Every legal order rests on an original act of violence (conquest, revolution) that the law, once established, declares illegitimate in others.

Example: the unification of Germany by Bismarck’s “blood and iron” (1871) inscribes into the Empire’s birth certificate a violence that its subsequent law will condemn in secessionists.
Counter-argument: John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) — the legitimacy of an order does not depend on its origin (violent or not) but on its conformity to principles that rational agents would choose behind a “veil of ignorance.”

Violence and representation The moral question shifts to the image: filming Omaha Beach (Saving Private Ryan, 1998) without aestheticizing the horror raises the problem of the duty to bear witness — does showing violence educate or anesthetize? (see Spielberg — The Cinema of Wonder and Memory). Counter-argument: Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003) doubts that the image of atrocity produces compassion — it may just as easily anesthetize the saturated viewer.

Critical nuance Reducing violence to physical violence alone (Weber, Arendt) leaves aside symbolic violence (Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 1998): internalized domination, which needs no blows. Johan Galtung (Violence, Peace and Peace Research, 1969) distinguishes direct violence (the blow), structural violence (inequalities that kill without an identifiable perpetrator), and cultural violence (what legitimizes the first two). The boundary of “violence” is itself a site of struggle.

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