Power, violence, and legitimacy: A reading of Hannah Arendt in an age of police brutality and humanitarian intervention

Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 260-287

  Young, Iris Marion ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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EID: 84890704575     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (26)

1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1969).
2. There are a few exceptions. See Ted Honderich, Violence for Equality (London: Routledge, 1989).
3. and Sergio Cotta, Why Violence (University of Florida Press, 1985).
4. John McGowan does focus specifically on the concept of violence in Arendt.
5. See McGowan, "Must Politics be Violent? Arendt's Utopian Vision," in Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 263-96.
6. I am grateful to the following people for comments on an earlier version of this essay that saved me from much wrong-headedness: David Alexander, Bat-Ami Bar On, Leah Bradshaw, Michael Geyer, Bonnie Honig, Jeffrey Isaac, Patchen Markell, Martin Matustik, Nancy Rosenblum, William Scheuerman, and Dana Villa.
7. Martha Minow, "Between Nations and Between Intimates: Can Law Stop the Violence?," esp. this volume.
8. See Robert Bernasconi, "The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America's Racial Divisions," Research in Phenomenology XXVI (1996): 3-24.
9. Anne Norton, "Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt," in Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 247-62.
10. The best critique of Arendt's idea of the social and its separation from the political is Hanna Pitkin's. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
11. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), esp. chapter 28.
12. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 77-78.
13. Jurgen Habermas contrasts Weber's instrumental and positivistic view of state power with Arendt's view, which he interprets as more normative and based in commu nication.
14. See Habermas, "Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power," in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 171-88.
15. See Arendt, "What is Authority?" in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 91-142.
16. Compare Leah Bradshaw, "Political Authority and Violence," paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association meetings, Quebec City, August 2000.
17. Nancy C. M. Hartsock suggests that in fact Arendt does undermine her concept of power by saying that power and violence often occur together.
18. See Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power (New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 220-21.
19. Jeffrey Isaac, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 149.
20. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob.
21. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 175.
22. Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," pp. 79-81; "The Social Psychology of World Religions," in Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, p. 294.
23. "Between Nations and Between Intimates: Can Law Stop the Violence?," p. 67.
24. "Between Nations and Between Intimates," p. 70.
25. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. chapters 6 and 10.
26. Information about the conduct of the war and its aftermath drawn from the Kosovo Report, chapters 3, 4, and 10.