Hannah Arendt
Now let us finally give the floor to a woman, who is quite unusual, though, on account of her celebrity – to Hannah Arendt who was ignored for some reason by all men who wrote on the topic of power. This is all the more strange, for it was Arendt who performed the clearest “divorce” of all English words signifying power in her book On Violence.
Her work was written in reaction to the student unrest of the late 1960s in Western Europe and the USA, which in many cases assumed the character of acts of violence. She needed to explain what violence is. Since almost all theorists tie violence to power, she needed to present a logical series of concepts, i.e. understand the essential specificities of the phenomena which stand behind the words “power,” “might,” “authority,” etc., which were already mentioned many times in this text. Being a conscientious researcher, Arendt quotes the pronouncements made on this account by J. S. Mill, C. W. Mills, Voltaire, K. Clausewitz, Max Weber, Bertrand de Jouvenel (who was popular in his time) and even R. Strausz-Hupé, a scholar of international affairs from the school of political idealism who defended the thesis about the legality of “power of man over man.” Having completed the necessary excursus, she advances her own interpretation of the aforementioned words-terms. So how does she define them?
Power corresponds to the human ability to act not just in any way, but “in concert,” i.e. together. Power never is a property of an individual; it belongs to a group and exists for as long as the group exists.[34] The disintegration of the group means the disappearance of power. (This reasoning is already noticeably different from the notions of the previously mentioned scholars.)
Strength, Arendt writes, is something inherent to the unit, the individual integrity. Such strength belongs to the object or the person and can manifest itself in its/his relations with other things or persons, but it is independent from them. (We have already met this approach. Strength is the physical individual characteristic of a man; it is not “socialized.”)
In Arendt’s opinion, the word force, which is often used as a synonym of violence, should be left in the language terminology for the “forces of nature” or “forces of circumstances,” to signify the release of energy through physical or social motion. (She makes an error here: if the word is left to “nature,” then a different word should be invented for “social motion,” otherwise the confusion remains.)
Arendt unexpectedly qualifies authority not as state authority (which is usually translated into Russian as “власть”), but as authority inherent to persons, for example in the relations between parents and children, or between teacher and pupil. An organization of the type of the Roman Senate (auctoritas in senatu) can also be authority, and so can a hierarchical organization of the type of the Church. The distinctive property of such authority is its unconditional recognition by those who must obey; no coercion or persuasion should be involved. In order for authority to be preserved, the person or organization must be respected.
Finally, violence is a tool that is phenomenologically close to physical force, since means of violence, same as any other means, are created and used to multiply natural force up to the point when in the last stage of their development they can completely replace physical force (р. 46).
In principle Arendt really did manage to turn words into terms; it doesn’t matter whether someone disagrees with her or not. What’s important is that at least it became clear what she means when she uses a specific word. Terminological preciseness is the first step on the way to concepts. She attempted to make this step about power and violence.
Arendt asserts that behind violence there always stands power. She stresses on many occasions that violence and power are not the same (as some theorists think). More than that, they are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears when power is endangered; when power is “in good shape,” there can be no violence. She summarizes: “Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost.” (p. 53) (This seems logical at first sight; not so much at second sight. Just previously she has written that behind violence there always stands power. Therefore if there is no power, there is no violence either. One sees such incongruities at every step in her work.)
Arendt’s small book is dedicated primarily to violence. She needed to show the interaction, or, more exactly, the correlation between violence and power as between the means and the objective; to show that violence as a means of politics often prevails over power, and this leads to sad consequences. It is tragic when a rifle gives birth to power, even though rifles, violence can indeed bring victory; the price paid is high, nonetheless. Still, although violence is the main topic of her book, the author failed to uncover the interrelations between the means of violence and its goals.
Arendt speaks out very actively against proponents of violence such as Georges Sorel, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Frantz Fanon. In particular, she attacks Jouvenel on account of the claim he made as if based on the laws of the organic world: the nature of power is such that seeks inevitably to expand and to consume the weak. Kings were killed in the past not because they were tyrants, but because they were weak. (р. 74) Jouvenel was speaking specifically of power, not of violence, even though Arendt equated the two terms in this case.
She was not opposed to violence in principle, because in her interpretation violence is “more the weapon of reform than of revolution.” (р. 79) The important thing is that violence as the means should not destroy power as the goal; everything must be done within the bounds of law, so to say. Her main advice is this: “We know, or we should know, that every decrease of power is an open invitation to violence.” (р. 87)
Arendt’s political stance is perfectly clear. As for terms, she never succeeded in turning them into concepts. Power-force simply turned in her interpretation into the state-force which must be protected from violence. Arendt failed to comprehend as a philosopher the essence of a single one of the terms she used. As a political scientist she failed to understand another simple thing: whether we’re talking about the state or the opposition groups (classes), they all have their state or social objectives which are achieved through some specific means – often by means of arms. Violence is not a means or a tool; it is the rifle that is the means. Violence is a form of struggle or suppression. However, behind violence, rifles and power, and behind all other “force-related” words, there stands something united which gives birth to all phenomena of social life. And this “united” thing evaded all the authors whom we examined.
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For my final example I will quote the approach used by some contemporary authors – a group of scientists from the RAND Corporation who wrote a methodical manual of sorts for calculating “National Power.”[35] Naturally, they analyzed the views of many of their compatriots on power, but not one satisfied them. To them, power consists of three parts: (1) allocation of resources (technologies, innovation, financial and human resources), of whatever nature these might be; (2) 'ability to use these resources', implying, among other things, 'a plan to use' and some 'minimal information about the conditions and consequences of this use'; (3) strategy, which is seen in the exercise 'not only against the inertia of things, but also against the resistance of the opposing wills. (рp. 13-14). In another formulation these three things form a triad of sorts: resources, strategy and results. They write: “National power can be defined simply as a country’s capacity to pursue strategic goals through proposed action.” (р. 44)
It follows from this that all countries possess national power, for all of them pursue strategic goals in one way or another. Clearly, this is not any kind of definition of power. Even though this work was written fairly recently, it contributed nothing new to the similar variants written by other Americans 30 and 40 years ago. Apparently, the RAND Corporation has so much funding that it can afford to fund vain projects.