A Critique of Violence

When, in 1968, Hannah Arendt posthumously published her friend Walter Benjamin’s essays in Illuminations, she excluded his now-famous, enigmatic work, “A Critique of Violence.” “A Critique of Violence” (1921) exhibits Benjamin’s philosophical investigations into the role of violence in modern state sovereignty and inherent in its law, and the construction of an alternative understanding of violence—or revolutionary violence—outside of the framework of the modern state. Increasingly relevant today, when violence plays an increasingly central role in spreading markets and controlling populations and when state sovereignty is increasingly undermined by corporate and fi nancial interests, the essay touched on many of the issues that Arendt herself addressed in her opposition to totalitarianism as well as in her theorizing on the politics of the revolutionary tradition and its outbreaks in her time. Arendt never gave any reason for the essay’s omission in her collection but spent a considerable part of her career refl ecting on the relation of violence to politics in ways that respond to Benjamin’s critique, though without any references to it.1 Arendt and Benjamin were both interested in a critique of historical materialism which would divorce thinking from being and open towards an unpredictable contingency not absorbable into a predetermining narrative of progress or causality that denies politics. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, like Benjamin, “Arendt is not concerned to establish some inevitable continuity between the past and present that would compel us to view what happened