Hannah Arendt‘s reflections on power, violence and terror

Abstract

In this paper, I address the question of Arendt’s distinction between power and violence. While violence according to Arendt is ruled by means-end reasoning, power corresponds to the human ability to act in concert. Thus power is the essence of all government, deriving its legitimacy from the people acting as a political community, while violence can never lead to the legitimate exercise of authority. Power and violence usually appear together, and violence may sometimes be justified; however, violence should never be equated with power in Arendt’s sense. Arendt also considers the relation between violence and terror. While terror involves violence, it is not identical with violence. She illustrates the difference by revealing the characteristic of terror in totalitarian regimes: the capacity to systematically destroy legitimate power and human plurality by destroying the space of action, the common world that is created between people.