The Great Debate: On Political Violence
Contents
1 Introductory Remarks
2 Historical Examples of Violence in Politics
3 Philosophy of Violence
4 Physical Versus Structural Violence
5 Concluding Thoughts
1 Introductory Remarks
On the 11th of September, a sniper fired a single shot which hit Charlie Kirk, the prominent right-wing commentator, on the neck – leading to his death a few hours later. This followed the murder of two Democratic lawmakers by a missionary who had a list of 70 other left-wing ‘targets’ in his car. These acts add extensively to the list of growing domestic political violence which has, at least in the West, come into growing prominence.
These incidents occur only three years after the storming of the Capitol on January 6th of 2021, a few months after Trump’s assassination attempt, and amidst the anti-Tesla property damages that have occurred across the US. These incidents have in sum been described, by a political scientist at the University of Chicago, as indicative of ‘a historically high period of American political violence.’ The rise in political violence is not, however, reserved for those ‘over the pond.’ Britain experienced through the summer of 2024 one of the largest race-riots in British history, following the murder of three children, continuing a tradition that many thought the country had left in the 20th century.
Thus, within this political climate, a pertinent question ought to be raised. A question that will be the fundamental topic of this prompt:
Is political violence effective in pushing one’s political agenda?
With other related questions including:
Is political violence justified?
Is a society, in which political violence occurs, healthy?
Does the rise of political violence illustrate the failure of a political system?
Is political violence a form of communication?
To give the readers a brief outlook on the issue, this prompt will split its sections between history and political philosophy. The first section will outline the history of two successful violent political movements: The French Revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, while the philosophy section will outline arguments against violence, with focuses on Rawls and Arendt, and will outline arguments for political violence, echoing Celikates.
2 Historical Examples of Violence in Politics
2.1 French Revolution
The Reign of Terror was without doubt a tragic event: 17,000 were executed and 10,000 died in prison or without trial. It was an excess of violence, where innocent people were executed in large numbers. The most important and hotly debated question in French revolutionary historiography is the relationship between the democratic progress of the First Republic, with the formation of the National Assembly and the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, and the violence of the terror. Was the terror a necessary evil, an outgrowth of the revolutionary ideals, or something else entirely?
Below I outline the major schools of thought which have been popular when viewing the terror (listed, although not nearly exhaustive). This provides a relevant framework for discussing other instances of political violence. Most importantly, it provides a framework with which to answer the question:
Can you separate the ideology or cause from the violence it leads to?
1 Cochin:
Cochin views the revolution as the outcome of enlightenment ideology. The French Revolution replaces practical government with a governance by the ideals of reason, virtue and equality, resulting in a government driven by ideals instead of a government focused on practical and social structures. Summarized, his argument states that a government by ideals demands unanimity; one must either support these ideals or not. The government of ideals of reason and equality must be coercive to maintain unanimity in a world where many people disagree with both method and ideals. Cochin believes this coercion is illustrated in the terror. For Cochin, it was not that the first republic had ‘lost its way’, instead the violence was inherent to the logic of the revolution.
2 Tocqueville:
Tocqueville’s writing on the revolution focuses on the continuities between the ‘Ancien Regime’ and post-revolutionary governance. He posits the Revolution continues the centralizing tendency of the French government, not breaking with the past but furthering the past political consensus. Although he praises the democratic ideals of the revolution,his work primarily focuses on these continuities. This continuation thus shows that the violent deposition of the king and the following terror were unnecessary. The revolution’s ideals were good, but the political climate in France did not change much. The revolution was impatient to the gradual motion of progress, the ongoing centralisation of the state, and the necessary growing pains that such reform entailed. Therefore, he outlines, the terror was an unnecessary tragedy, and the political violence was an impatient replacement for the gradual progress already taking place in France, leading to unnecessary deaths.
3 Lefebvre:
Lefebvre is the leading voice in the Marxist position on the French revolution. He views the French Revolution as a series of overlapping revolutions, by Aristocrats, the Bourgeois, and the working class. The traditionally competing interests of these groups came together to rally against the crown. Aristocrats sought to protect their feudal privileges, the Bourgeois sought to replace the feudal hierarchy with a capitalistic one, and the proletariat sought to gain social and political equality. Lefebvre argues that the terror was not inherent in any of these positions. For Lefebvre, the most successful class was the Bourgeois, who successfully replaced the feudal hierarchy and placed the Bourgeois at the top of French society, installing Capitalism as the main economic system in France for the first time. To protect their newfound power from invasion and internal strife, the Bourgeois accepted radical measures demanded by the working-class, including price ceilings, requisitions, and violence against those who threatened the new status quo. After the Thermidor, the period denoting the end of the terror, the Bourgeois restored a more traditional capitalistic order, with private property and rule of law. Political violence was thus a political necessity for the Bourgeois to maintain power.
4 Michelet:
Michelet views the revolution as the rebirth of the French people. He mythologizes the revolution as the moral awakening of French nation. As a romantic historian, he describes the period in emotional, sometimes quasi-religious terms. He eulogies the heroes of the revolution, framing the process as a national myth. Centred in his theory for therevolution, is his description of the French people (not as a class but as a moral entity) which was reborn by overthrowing the oppressive rule of the monarchy. The energy and greatness of the French people thus conflicts with the extreme violence of the terror. Michelet in many ways abhors the violence but also views it as the only path for the people to achieve and protect their revolutionary ideals. For Michelet, it was inevitable that the passion and energy of the revolution, when facing internal civil war, invasion, and a desire to protect the republic would lead to violence. The terror was terrible, but necessary and inevitable to protect the revolutionary ideals. ‘The revolution was the Tardy advent of eternal justice’.
2.2: White Violence
As opposed to the progress of politics through violence, as seen in the French Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement is an archetypal example of non-violent political activism. The SCLC, CORE, and other accompanying Civil Rights activist groups incited unrest through non-violent means while legal representatives, such as the NAACP, challenged the legal institutions of the United States.
However, as Celikates notes, it is wrong to describe the acts of the ‘Freedom Riders’, ‘Sit-in-ers’, and marchers as necessarily non-violent. Though their actions may have been ostensibly non-violent, what was crucial to their political and rhetorical success was the violence they encountered. The juxtaposition between the non-violence of Civil Rights activists, and the overwhelming violence of white resisters, was broadcasted all throughout the US. With the most prominent instance exemplified by the fire hoses and unleashed dogs of Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama. The characteristically southern, macho, and possibly stupid, Birmingham’s ‘Commissioner for Public Safety’, Bull Connor answered the marchers, of whom many were school children, with overwhelming and unnecessary violence. Pictures and stories of the violence rang far into the North of the country, with the now infamous front page of the New York Times on the 4th of May 1963.
With growing political pressure and with the murder of Medgar Evers following shortly after, Jack Kennedy announced on the 11th of June 1963 that he had begun drafting a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill.
2.3: Peaceful Counter-Protestors
As many historians note, the political success of the Birmingham March was achieved through lessons learnt from a demonstration held in Albany in 1961-1962. Laurie Pritchett, Albany’s chief of police, embodying the flip side of the stereotype of ‘Southern Hospitality’, was tasked with dealing with the SCLC and CORE in his city. His approach to these, so-called, ‘outside agitators’ was far more muted than his Birmingham counterpart.
Pritchett’s approach relied not on overwhelming violence but targeting the medium through which King could reach the nation. Though King was arrested, he was released after a short while, with King’s insistence that he remain in confinement falling on deaf ears. Moreover, to overcome the tactic of overcrowding prisons, Pritchett utilised prisons and jails all across Georgia to detain the marchers; thereby avoiding further confrontation and dissipating the political pressure throughout the state.
Albany was an abject failure on behalf of the SCLC, CORE, and King. The lack of confrontation and white political violence meant there was little to report on by the East Coast media establishment. A failure which was noted by the respective Civil Rights leaders, who began to turn their heads on a more militant alternative.
2.4: Assassination of Kennedy
‘The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind.’
- Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1963.
Though JFK is often celebrated as the greatest progressive leader of the early 60s, his promising term ending abruptly after his death in Texas, it is rarely noted in the popular psyche that his first two years were noticeably ineffective. His promises of Civil Rights reform were anchored by his political immaturity and his overwhelming pragmatic cautiousness. Though his presidency picked up pace in 1963, it remains historical conjecture whether he would have been as effective as Lyndon Johnson in pushing for the critical reform America would experience.
Moving past my crush for LBJ, why does the assassination of Kennedy remain relevant? Saliently, it remains maybe the most notable act of political violence in American history, rivalled only by Lincoln’s assassination. Moreover, President Johnson’s use of the aftermath of the assassination to further his political goals is of high pertinence to our prompt, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
‘No (…) eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill which he fought so long.’
- Lyndon Baines Johnson, November 1963.
These were the words included in Lyndon Johnson’s address to congress in November. The association of Kennedy’s death with his supposed undying legacy of Civil Rights reform swayed the opinion polls in favour of sweeping Civil Rights legislation.
Hence, the point is now clear. As political commentators have noted, assassinations of high-profile political figures are of ample opportunity for political utilisation. This analysis is in line with the events following the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk; With President Donald Trump claiming ‘He’s (Kirk) a martyr for truth and freedom’ and that the American left’s labelling of figures like him as ‘Nazis’ or ‘Fascists’ was to blame for the murder. With Trump’s already evident eagerness to extend the executive authority over its legal and historical precedent, the assassination of Kirk has emboldened the rising tyrant.
3 Philosophy of Violence
3.1 Arendt on Political Violence
This section explores Hannah Arendt’s analysis of power and violence, building on the historical facts of the preceding section. Before one can reflect on, and develop the relationship between, power and violence, it is necessary to define what these are, and specifically what Arendt means by them. To begin, violence is an instrument; it is justified by its ends. Furthermore, violence is dependent on tools and artefacts, (which can include the people). Finally, like power, violence can invite obedience and give command to the wielder of violence, and this similarity often leads to the conflation of violence with power.
Arendt is adamant that power and violence are two different things. Characteristically, she bases her definition of power in line with, as she claims, stems from the Athenian isonomy and the Roman civitas. This interpretation claims power to exist inter homines, between people. Power as a property can only exist as intersubjective. Therefore, for Arendt, power does not equate oppression, but rather power ‘corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert’ (On Violence, p. 44). Power emerges from cohesion, group consent and group action. When one points to the Prime Minister, for example, and states ‘he is in power,’ they refer to him as being empowered by the voting population. When a person in power loses this public cohesion and consent, they lose the authority to do things in their name. To lose the group, is to lose the source of their empowerment. Thus, they lose this power.
One is justified in asking, why is this understanding of power more salient or correct, than those who see violence to be the prerequisite of power? The latter view is the implicit assumption that many of us hold. After all, Max Weber defines the state, the most evident holder of power, as an apparatus that can exercise violence with justification. Those who can wield violence to the most devastating effect, thus have the most power. Yet Arendt shows this conditional to be false, and necessarily so. Arendt thus argues:
Assumption: If an organisation can exercise violence, they have power in virtue of that violence.
P1: The most capable and destructive exerciser of violence is the state.
P2: There exist many instances of revolution, or social reform where the masses with lesser means of violence overthrew the sitting government.
Conclusion: The assumption is not the case.
Of course, it is the case that the state can and has been the source of violence, but these exercises of violence depend on the structure of government, which in turn depends on Arendt’s intersubjective definition of power. Further, as clarified earlier, violence relies on tools and artefacts, which include people, the source of power. Power is further differentiated from violence by the nature of their ontology. Violence is an instrument, power, an end in itself.
In On Violence, Arendt describes the Prague Spring as a ‘textbook case of a confrontation between violence and power in their pure states.’ (Arendt, p.53) Though violence is often able to subdue power, this action often comes at a significant cost: Power. (Arendt, p.53) One must remember that the vibrant intellectual circle of communists in Britain collapsed almost immediately after the Prague Spring, with those still loyal to the cause labelled ‘tankies’ in reference to the tanks used by the Red Army to crush the uprising. The threat that violence poses on power is further elaborated by Arendt, who argues that Britain’s supposedly peaceful, as much as a colonial departure can be, departure from India, and France’s from Algeria were due to the recognition that any attempt at violence would only result in a further loss of their power, especially at home (Arendt, p.53).
This analysis is supported, I argue, by the Civil Rights Movement mentioned above. The violence suffered by the activists were met with horror and resulting disdain for the Southern segregationist institutions, challenging further resistance to Civil Rights legislation.
3.2: Civil Disobedience as Public Act
John Rawls defines civil disobedience as a 'public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done to bring about a change in the law.' (Rawls 1971, p.364). Furthermore, it is a movement that keeps its fidelity to the law. The participants of civil disobedience acknowledge openly that they are breaking the law and are willing to accept the punishment that comes along with it. Though one breaks the law, ‘one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order’. Rawls further lists three conditions which justify civil disobedience. These conditions are:
(i) When either of the two principles of justice are broken.
(ii) When it is used as a last resort after all legal routes have been exhausted.
(iii) It does not lead to the dissolution of society.
The two principles of justice mentioned in (i) are as follows. The first principle states that each person has the right to the ‘most extensive total system of equal basic liberties’ that is compatible with others enjoying the same amount of such right. The second principle requires for two conditions to be met; inequality in a society serves to the ‘greatest benefit of the least advantaged’ and all opportunities are equally open to everyone regardless of their socio-economic status.
Thus, for Rawls, civil disobedience is a political practice that challenges the political system by appealing to the principles of justice that underly the political system. Furthermore, conditions (ii) and (iii) suggest a political movement that is radical yet remains faithful to the structure and the system of society as it exists. Though civil disobedients break the law, the way they seek change is through communicating their grievances by appealing to a sense of justice. Their actions are done in dire hopes that their voices are amplified and convincing enough to warrant political change. Thus, civil disobedience is a public act that ‘addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that (…) (principles of justice are) not being respected’. Thus, due to the nature of civil disobedience as an appeal to public conscience, violent acts may have the counterproductive effect of obscuring their appeal and presenting the civil disobedients as repugnant to the conscience of the public.
3.2.1: Celikates’ Argument Against Rawls
However, for writers like Robin Celikates defining civil disobedience as an appeal to the majority is restrictive and counterproductive. He writes:
‘it is difficult to see why one should appeal to it at all when the majority’s sense of justice is taken to be systematically distorted or biased and has shown itself to be largely immune to critical challenges’
and in a society where the majority’s sense of justice is so distorted, ‘it is unclear to whose sense of justice Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was appealing’. Celikates further challenges the notion that King expressed fidelity to the law by writing ‘(from) the fact that many disobedients (King) are committed to the principle of the rule of law it does not follow that they express fidelity to the law as it exists’.
Celikates’ argument depends on two assumptions. First, that the ‘systematically distorted or biased’ views of the majority are ‘largely immune to critical challenges’ and hence not likely to be the subject to change. Second, that there was not a deeper, more profound sense of justice which a civil disobedient could appeal to that could override their society’s ‘distorted’ sense of justice. King did exactly this and constantly referred to the deeper, more profound sense of justice held by many Americans. Namely, the principles of liberty and equality found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. By doing this, King pointed out to the majority the inconsistencies in the application of their conception of justice. I argue that King’s methodology is a great example of Rawls’ position that civil disobedience is an appeal to principles that underly the political order. King’s actions addressed this deeper sense of justice, contradicted the distorted sense proposed by segregation and galvanised enough political support to pass the 1964 Civil Rights bill and the 1965 Voting Rights bill through Congress, enshrining it into law. Thereby outlawing Jim crow segregation, a status quo that had previously ‘shown itself to be largely immune to critical challenges.’
However, Celikates’ challenge is not without warrant. King was fiercely disliked by most of the American public, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Moreover, his argument is critical of Rawls’ reliance on justice. More specifically, he is critical of the assumption that the pre-existing society has principles of, or fidelity to, a sense of societal justice. What if the given society is not just? What if the sense of justice that exists within society is insufficient to fully address the oppressive forces that pertains to that given society? Rawlsmay have an answer, but it is not very satisfactory to my view. Violent political actions are only justified in unjust societies (great!), but it is fair to conclude that this condition has yet to be met in our history. Thus, what we seemed to have been left with is a practically unhelpful argument against political violence.
Nevertheless, Rawls’ notion that civil disobedience is necessarily a public act is insightful. Furthermore, his outlining of political violence can function as a useful litmus test for our own societies. His argument is a biconditional relationship between justice and civil disobedience. Thus, when a society cannot express civil disobedience, or if political expression of civil disobedience is replaced by violent forms, then we find the entailment that these societies are not just.
4 Physical Versus Structural Violence
When we speak of political violence, we often imagine the most visible forms: riots, assassinations, bombings, coups. Yet, as Johan Galtung reminds us in his essay Violence, Peace and Peace Research (1969):
‘Violence is present when human beings are influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realisations are below their potential realisations.’
This broader conception introduces what he calls structural violence: Harm caused not by direct physical acts, but by the social, economic and political structures that limit individuals’ potential to flourish. From this perspective, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the storming of the Capitol, and the Birmingham fire hoses are all physical violence, immediate and visible, while segregation, disenfranchisement and poverty constitute structural violence. Both are political, both are sustained or resisted through power.
4.1: Shifts and Visibility: Has Violence Increased, or Just Changed Form?
A pressing question arises in the current climate; Has political violence increased, or have we merely shifted from the subtle invisible violence of structural inequity to the spectacular, visible violence of physical confrontations? Or perhaps the inverse: as structural inequalities deepen, (economic precarity, algorithmic surveillance, state neglect), physical violence erupts as a symptom of long-ignored tension.
Consider France’s Gilets Jaunes movement. Sparked by a fuel tax, it evolved into a violent critique of economic inequality and governmental elitism. Here, physical violence, (riots, burning cars), was a reaction to structural violence (economic exclusion and policy indifference). Similarly, in the United States, the 2020 George Floyd protests were both a reaction to the physical act of police brutality and the structural violence of racialised policing and incarceration.
Both cases illustrate the need to distinguish the two: Structural violence accumulates until it erupts in physical form. Physical violence, once quelled, often re-solidifies into structural arrangements of repression or surveillance.
4.2 Rawls, Celikates and Justification
Rawls’ idea of civil disobedience in A Theory of Justice presupposes that structural injustice can be confronted through public, non-violent resistance within a ‘nearly just society’. But what if the society is not nearly just? Celikates, building on both Arendt and critical theory, argues that disobedience must sometimes transgress legality to reveal structural violence. Political violence, from this view, can be a communicative act: a desperate means of making visible what is otherwise invisible.
For example, though it may be easy to disregard the 2024 Race Riots in Britain as instances of racialised xenophobic jingoism, a more sufficient interpretation would give greater breadth to the cause of these riots. That is, though these racialised sentiments were a key motivator, ignoring the economic stagnation and political/economic marginalisation experienced throughout the country as an additional motivator is naïve and shortsighted. Thus, the riots were the physical manifestation of long-silenced grievances, both actual and artificial. This brings us back to our historical analysis: Just as the violence of the French Revolution was tied to the structural violence of the Regime, today’s ‘domestic terrorism’ might reflect an erosion of faith in institutional redress.
4.3: Structural Power and Structural Violence
The philosopher Iris Marion Young expands Galtung’s analysis, describing structural violence as a matter of distributed responsibility. No single actor ‘commits’ the violence, but everyone benefits from or participates in the system that perpetuates it. Structural violence thus resists the moral clarity of physical acts. Yet, as Celikates and Franz Fanon both observe, when systemic structures deny agency, physical violence can become a reassertion of subjectivity and a reclamation of power.
Fanon saw anti-colonial violence as an existential cleansing: Not merely a tool, but a means for the colonised to reconstitute their humanity. Arendt would recoil at this, insisting that such violence, though sometimes effective, remains instrumental and risks annihilating the very space of political action.
Overall, understanding violence today requires attention not just to acts of harm, but to the structures that make such harm intelligible, necessary or invisible. The health of a political system is measured not merely by the absence of physical violence, but by the presence of power, that is, by the capacity of people to act together without coercion.
5 Concluding Thoughts
In a liberal democratic political system, political violence is shunned and often condemned categorically. These sentiments are echoed by liberal thinkers like Arendt and Rawls, who provide arguments and theoretical frameworks against political violence. However, structural violence, including marginalisation and oppression, may be too lofty to persuade the public’s fidelity to justice.
Can these more structural, and economic forms of marginalisation really be addressed through peaceful means of political expression?
If so, in what ways do Arendt’s and Rawls’ arguments fail? Should this structural violence be considered violence? If it is considered as such, is it just to respond with physical violence? How do we address that structural violence often motivates and instantiates physical violence?
These questions, along with those mentioned in our introduction, shall be the subject of our debate.