On Violence was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1970, arising from Arendt’s reflections on the student movements of the 1960s and the widespread glorification of violence as a revolutionary instrument. The essay is short — barely a hundred pages — but its argument is both precise and radical.
Arendt’s central thesis is that power and violence are not the same thing, not even variations on a spectrum. Power, in her definition, is the capacity of a group to act in concert — it arises wherever people gather and agree to act together, and it disappears when they disperse. Violence is an instrument — a means to an end — that is typically used when power is absent or has broken down. A totalitarian regime that must use terror against its own population has lost power, not gained it; it substitutes violence for the consent it cannot obtain.
This distinction challenges the entire tradition of political theory from Max Weber to Mao Zedong. Weber defined the state by its monopoly on legitimate violence; Mao declared that power grows out of the barrel of a gun; Fanon and Sartre argued that violence was a creative force that could generate new political communities. Arendt rejects all of these: violence can destroy power, but it cannot create it; it can compel obedience, but it cannot generate the willing cooperation that is the foundation of stable government.
The essay was written in response to the specific situation of the late 1960s — the student revolts, the Vietnam War, the Black Power movement — but its argument transcends its occasion. The distinction between power and violence remains one of the most useful analytical tools in political theory.
Collecting On Violence
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1970): Slim volume, cloth or paper.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Paperback first printing: $8–$15