A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

The real rift between black and white is not healed when it is being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt.

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Rifts of Guilt

Where all are guilty, however, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are always the best possible safeguard against the discovery of the actual culprits.

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

The Bureaucracy Of Our Confession Collective Guilt

To resort to violence in view of outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of the immediacy and swiftness inherent in it. It goes against the grain of rage and violence to act with deliberate speed; but this does not make it irrational. On the contrary, in private as well as pub…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Understanding Violence Violence

Without knowing it they had tested the system; they intended no more than to challenge the ossified university system, and down came the system of governmental power together with that of the huge party bureaucracies—‘une sorte de desintégration de toutes les hiérarchies.’ It was a textbook case of…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

The Night After The Revolution

In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only so long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is, so long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to risk their lives and…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Weapons of Politics

It is one of the most obvious distinctions between power and violence that power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence relying on instruments up to a point can manage without them. A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Fascism Fascism vs. Democracy Violence vs. Opinion Hannah Arendt & Obama

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them. This is what Madison meant when he said, ‘all governments rest on opinion,’ a statement that is no less true for the various forms of m…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Power Politics Violence

If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: ‘How do you wish the world to be in fifty years?’ and ‘What do you want your life to be like five years from now?’ the answers are quite often preceded by a ‘Provided that there is still a world,’ and ‘Provided I am still alive.

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

End of the World The World Is Always Ending

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of governm…

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Against Bureaucracy Against Massive Universalist Governing Systems Bureaucracy

The simple fact about progress is that the future of mankind has nothing to offer the individual life, except death.

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

Death Dying Progress Human Life

The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.

— Hannah Arendt, nybooks.com

New Kinds Of Geopolitical War

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