Argument and rhetoric in the justification of political violence

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 180-199

  Frazer, Elizabeth ^a   Hutchings, Kimberly ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^b LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Beauvoir; Fanon; Justification; Merleau Ponty; Persuasion; Politics; Rhetoric; Schmitt; Sorel; Violence; Weber

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547699640     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885107074349     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Both 'violence' and 'politics' are contested concepts. For the purposes of this article, we use the term 'violence' to mean the potentially lethal use of physical force and the direct and indirect effects of such a use of force in terms of killing and injury, material destruction and the mental and spiritual effects on people (both perpetrators and victims) of killing, injury and material destruction. When referring to the role of violence in politics, or to 'political violence', we mean the employment of the potentially lethal use of force by actors in the public sphere for publicly acknowledged, collective ends, from national security to national liberation or social revolution.
2. The thinkers with whom we are concerned refer in the course of their own arguments to Christian, liberal pacifist and just war arguments, i.e. positions that take seriously the idea that violence can be banished from politics, and it should be treated as a pathological rather than a normal or welcome feature of political life. Examples of the kinds of argument they have in mind would include: Immanuel Kant (1991) 'Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leo Tolstoy (1967) Writings of Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence. New York: Bergman. Jean Bethke Elshtain (ed.) (1991) Just War Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Michael Walzer (2000) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books. Elaine Scarry (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sara Ruddick (1990) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. London: Women's Press. This article is part of a larger project in which we are examining and assessing the range of ways in which the practice of violence, as part of politics, is explained and defended within western political thought.
3. Hannah Arendt (1969) On Violence, pp. 106-7. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
4. This article focuses on the arguments concerning politics and violence in the following texts. The dates in square brackets are the dates of original publication: Georges Sorel (1999) [1908] Reflections on Violence, ed. J. Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Max Weber's essays and lectures, [1895-1919] in Weber (1970) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weber (1994) Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber (1978) [1921] Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittlich. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carl Schmitt (1986) [1918] Political Romanticism, tr. G. Oates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt (1985) [1922] Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. G. Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmitt (1996) [1927] Concept of the Political, tr. G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1969) [1947] On Humanism and Terror...
5. Schmitt is the exception here.
6. The problems raised by instrumental, consequentialist rationalizations of violence are not peculiar to the case of violent action alone, of course; they raise general questions about the nature and role of causation in social life.
7. Weber (1978, in n. 4), pp. 905-6.
8. Weber (1970, in n. 4), p. 334; (1994), pp. 310-1.
9. Sorel (1999 in n. 4), p. 182.
10. Weber (1994, in n. 4), p. 360.
11. Merleau-Ponty M. (n. 4), p. 1.
12. Ibid. p. 126.
13. Ibid. p. 107.
14. Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction between Machiavellianism in general and Marxist achiavellianism. Whereas the former assumes the external relation of means and ends, and sees ends as justifying means via a process of calculation or trade-off, the Marxist Machiavellian is fully attuned to the incalculability of outcomes. Ibid. pp. 119-20.
15. Ibid. p. 113.
16. Beauvoir (n. 4), pp. 109-13.
17. Ibid. pp. 115-16.
18. Ibid. p. 124.
19. Ibid
20. Fanon (n. 4), pp. 73-4.
21. Ibid. pp. 200-50.
22. Beauvoir (n. 4) 95, 45-62. See also Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), pp. 33, 42, 44.
23. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), pp. 48-9.
24. Ibid. p. 26.
25. Ibid. pp. 47,34.
26. Weber (1978, in n. 4), pp. 20-2, 48-56.
27. Ibid. pp. 54-6.
28. Ibid. p. 904
29. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), p. 61.
30. Beauvoir (n. 4), pp. 113, 118. 118.
31. Sorel (n. 4), pp. 17, 42-3.
32. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4) p. 1.
33. Fanon actually uses the term 'Manichean'' - (n. 4), pp. 39, 73.
34. Ibid. pp. 27, 45.
35. Ibid. p. 69.
36. Ibid. pp. 29-31.
37. For instance, Arendt's argument as to the relation between violence and politics: Arendt (n. 3).
38. For instance one might take Rousseau or Marx as one's starting point for philosophical anthropology rather than Augustine, Machiavelli or Hobbes.
39. Political theories may take the 'natural' status of violence as a starting point in their account of the human condition without seeing it as an ineliminable feature of politics. Hobbesian and Lockean social contract arguments exemplify political theories that see politics as the overcoming of a violent state of nature.
40. The equation of pacifism with passivity is common, but it is not self-evident, see Ruddick (1990).
41. Fanon was a psychoanalyst by training and draws on a Freudian model of libidinal economy, within which energy is always conserved and if it cannot flow in one direction, flows in another.
42. Weber (1970, in n. 4), pp. 364-5.
43. Weber (1994, in n. 4), p. 354.
44. Ibid. p. 16.
45. Weber (1970, in n. 4), p. 335.
46. Weber (1994, in n. 4), pp. 76-9.
47. Weber (1970, in n. 4), pp. 254-6.
48. Ibid. p. 254.
49. Sorel (n. 4), p. 202.
50. Ibid. pp. 188-90.
51. Ibid. pp. 101-8.
52. Ibid. pp. 105-6.
53. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), pp. 34, 39. Beauvoir (n. 4), p. 124.
54. Fanon (n. 4), p. 74.
55. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), pp. 36, 65.
56. Weber (1994, in n. 4), pp. 77, 365. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), pp. xxxix, 41. Beauvoir (n. 4), pp. 107-8.
57. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), p. xxxix.
58. Immanuel Kant (1987) Critique of Judgment, tr. W.S. Pluhar, pp. 126-40. Indianapolis. Hackett.
59. Sorel (n. 4), pp. 115-18, 206-8.
60. Ibid. p. 244.
61. Schmitt (1985, in n. 4), pp. 5, 36.
62. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), p. 35.
63. Fanon (n. 4), pp. 73-4.
64. Ibid. p. 252.
65. It might seem wrong to identify Schmitt with a Romantic aesthetic, given his critique in Political Romanticism and his ongoing association, in his later work, of Romanticism with liberalism. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the role of the 'exception' and the 'decision' in politics, as well as his insistence on the autonomy of the political, and its identification with existential extremity and intensity, are difficult to grasp as anything other than highly reminiscent of Romanticism. Schmitt (1986, in n. 4); (1996, in n. 4), p. 72.
66. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), pp. 30-1.
67. Ibid. pp. 69-73. Sorel (n. 4), p. 211.
68. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), pp. xlv, 110. Beauvoir (n. 4), p. 119.
69. Fanon (n. 4), p. 47.
70. Weber (1994, in n. 4), pp. 355-65.
71. Sorel (n. 4), p. 210.
72. Fanon (n. 4), p. 52.
73. Weber (1994, in n. 4), p. 14.
74. Schmitt (1996, in n. 4), p. 36.
75. Merleau-Ponty (n. 4), p. 128. Beauvoir (n. 4), pp. 133-4.
76. Sorel (n. 4), pp. 85, 105. Fanon (n. 4), p. 31.