The technical development of the 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.
Violence harbors within itself an additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortuna, good or ill luck, play a more fateful role in human affairs than on the battlefield, and this intrusion of the utterly unexpected does not disappear when people call it a “random event” and find it scientifically suspect; nor can it be eliminated by simulations, scenarios, game theories, and the like. There is no certainty in these matters, not even an ultimately certainty of mutual destruction under certain calculated circumstances.
No substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. Was not Hobbes right when he said: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words”?
Only in those parts of the world not covered by nuclear deterrence is war still possible, and even this conventional warfare, despite its horrors, is actually already limited by the ever-present threat of escalation into nuclear war.
Its chief argument, that war is so essential to the functioning of our society that we dare not abolish it unless we discover even more murderous ways of dealing with our problems, will shock only those who have forgotten to what an extent the unemployment crisis of the Great Depression was solved only through the outbreak of WW2.
The trouble is that they are not cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they do not think. Instead of indulging in such an old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity, they reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences.
Events are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; only in a world in which nothing of importance ever happens could the futurologists’ dream come true. Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens.
The danger is that these theories are not only plausible, because they take their evidence from actually discernible present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with reality and factuality.
In Engel’s words: “wherever the power structure of a country contradicts its economic development” it is political power with its means of violence that will suffer defeat.
Peace is the continuation of war by other means. A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.
This bears an ominous similarity to one of political science’s oldest insights, namely that power cannot be measured in terms of wealth, that an abundance of wealth may erode power, that riches are particularly dangerous to the power and well-being of republics.
He regarded the state as an instrument of violence in the command of the ruling class; but the actual power of the ruling class did not consist of or rely on violence. It was defined by the role the ruling class played in society, or, more exactly, by its role in the process of production.
Irrepressible violence is man recreating himself, that it is through “mad fury” that “the wretched of the earth” can “become men.”
Their first reaction was a revulsion against every form of violence, an almost matter-of-course espousal of a politics of nonviolence.
Their behavior has been blamed on all kinds of social and psychological factors — on too much permissiveness in their upbringing in America and on an explosive reaction to too much authority in Germany and Japan, on the lack of freedom in Eastern Europe and too much freedom in the West, on the disastrous lack of jobs for sociology students in France and the superabundance of careers in nearly all fields in the US — all of which appear locally plausible enough but are clearly contradicted by the fact that the student rebellion is a global phenomenon.
Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx’s society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity.
Inconsistency has always been the Achilles’ heel of liberal thought; it combined an unswerving loyalty to Progress with a no less strict refusal to glorify History in Marxian and Hegelian terms, which alone could justify and guarantee it.
The notion that there is a thing as progress of mankind as a whole was unknown prior to the 17th century, developed into a rather common opinion among the 18th century hommes de lettres, and became an almost universally accepted dogma in the 19th. But the difference between the earlier notions and their final stage is decisive. The 17th century thought of progress in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, whereas for the 18th the word implied an “education of mankind” whose end would coincide with man’s coming of age. Progress was not unlimited, and Marx’s classless society seen as the realm of freedom that could be the end of history actually still bears the hallmark of the Age of Enlightenment. Beginning of the 19th century, however, all such limitations disappeared. Now, the laws of movement alone are eternal.
Its great advantage becomes clear as soon as one compares it with other concepts of history — such as “eternal recurrences,” the rise and fall of empires, the haphazard sequence of essentially unconnected events — all of which can equally be documented and justified, but none of which will guarantee a continuum of linear time and continuous progress in history.
Progress, to be sure, is a more serious and a more complex item offered at the superstition fair of our time.
There exists a consensus among political theorists from Left to Right to the effect that violence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power. “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence”. “The state is the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate, violence.”
And power, it turns out, is an instrument of rule, while rule owes its existence to “the instinct of domination.” A man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself and making others the instruments of his will, which gives him incomparable pleasure.
Power consists in making others act as I choose; it is present wherever I have the chance to assert my own will against the resistance of others. War is an act of violence to compel the opponent to do was we wish.
To command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power. If the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”
We have to decide whether an in what sense “power” can be distinguished from “force,” as to ascertain how the fact of using force according to law changes the quality of force itself and presents us with an entirely different picture of human relations, since force, by the very fact of being qualified, ceases to be force.
The also coincide with the terms used since Greek antiquity to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man — of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy. Today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called rule by Nobody.
The first lesson of civilization is that of obedience.
The instinct of submission, an ardent desire to obey and be ruled by some strong man, is at least as prominent in human psychology as the will to power, and, politically, perhaps more relevant.
They too still stalked about obedience — obedience to laws instead of men; but what they actually meant was support of the laws to which the citizenry had given its consent. Such support is never unquestioning, and as far as reliability is concerned it cannot match the indeed “unquestioning obedience” that an act of violence can exact.
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. “All governments rest on opinion,” a word no less true for the various forms of monarchy than for democracies. The king, who is but one solitary individual, stands far more in need of the general support of society than any other form of government. Even the tyrant, the one who rules against all, needs helpers in the business of violence, though their number may be rather restricted.
A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable in the suppression of the rights of minorities and very effective in the suffocation of dissent without any use of violence.
It is a rather sad reflection on the present state of political science that our terminology does not distinguish among such key words as “power,” “strength,” “force,” “authority,” and, finally “violence” — all of which refer to distinct, different phenomena and would hardly exist unless they id.
Might, power, authority: these are all words to whose exact implications no great weight is attached in current speech; even the greatest thinkers sometimes use them at random.
The conviction that the most crucial political issue is, and always has been, the question of Who rules Whom? Power, strength, force, authority, violence — these are but words to indicate the means by which man rules over man; they are held to be synonyms because they have the same function.
Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group disappears, his power also vanishes.
Strength unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity; it is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things or person, but is essentially independent of them. The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence. It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
Force should be reserved for the “forces of nature” or the “force of circumstances.”
Authority can be vested in persons — there is such a thing as personal authority, as, for instance, in the relation between parent and child, between teacher and pupil — or it can be vested in offices. Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed. To remain in authority requires respect for the person or the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
Violence is distinguished by its instrumental character.
Still it must be admitted that it is particularly tempting to think of power in terms of command and obedience, and hence to equate power with violence, in a discussion of what actually is only one of power’s special cases — namely, the power of government.
In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only as long as the power structure of the government is intact — that is, as long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to use their weapons. When this is no longer the case, the situation changes abruptly. Not only is the rebellion not put down, but the arms themselves change hands.
Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the question of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion and by the number of those who share it. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience — to laws, to rulers, to institutions — is but the outward manifestation of support and consent.
We have recently witnessed how it did not take more than the relatively harmless, essentially nonviolent French students’ rebellion to reveal the vulnerability of the whole political system, which rapidly disintegrated before the astonished eyes of the young rebels.
No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. .Even the totalitarian rulers, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis — the secret police and its net of informers. Only the development of robot soldiers would eliminate the human factor completely. Even the most despotic domination we know of, the rule of master over slaves, who always outnumbered him, did not rest on superior means of coercion as such, but on a superior organization of power — that is, on the organized solidarity of the masters. Single men without others to support them never have enough power to use violence successfully.
Power is indeed of the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything.
And what is the end of peace? There is no answer. Peace is an absolute. Power is in the same category; it is, as they say, “an end in itself.”
Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy.
Violence can always destroy power. What never can grow out of it is power.
It has often been said that impotence breeds violence. Politically speaking, loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power.
Terror is not the same as violence, rather, the form of government that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. It has often been noticed that the effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization. Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before the full force of terror can be let loose. This atomization — an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies — is maintained and intensified through the ubiquity of the informer, who can be literally omnipresent because he no longer is merely a professional agent in the pay of the police but potentially every person one comes into contact with.
The decisive difference between totalitarian domination, based on terror, and tyrannies and dictatorships, established by violence, is that the former turns not only against its enemies but against its friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes todays’s victim.
There exist now a great many plausible explanations for the de-Stalinization of Russia — none, I believe, so compelling as the realization by the Stalinist functionaries themselves that a continuation of the regime would lead, not to an insurrection, against which terror is indeed the best safeguard, but to paralysis of the whole country.
If we define man as belonging to the animal kingdom, why should we ask him to take his standards of behavior from another animal species? The answer is simple: It is easier to experiment with animals, and this not only for humanitarian reasons — that it is not nice to put into cages; the trouble is men can cheat.
Only when our sense of justice is offered do we react with rage, and this reason by no means necessarily reflects personal injury, as is demonstrated by the whole history of revolution, where invariably members of the upper classes touched off and then led the rebellions of the oppressed and downtrodden.
To resort to violence when confronted with outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of its inherent immediacy and swiftness.
“All white men are guilty” is not only dangerous nonsense but also racism in reverse, and it serves quite effectively to give the very real grievances and rational emotions of the Negro population an outlet into irrationality, an escape from reality.
In all illegal enterprises, criminal or political, the group, for the sake of its own safety, will require that each individual perform an irrevocable action in order to burn his bridges to respectable society before he is admitted into the community of violence.
Something we are usually hardly aware of, namely, that our own death is accompanied by the potential immortality of the group we belong to and, in the final analysis, of the species, moves into the center of our experience. It is as though life itself, the immortal life of the species, nourished, as it were, by the sempiternal dying of its individual members, is “surging upward,” is actualized in the practice of violence.
The trouble was that only that as soon as the workers had reached a satisfactory level of working and living conditions, they stubbornly refused to remain proletarians and play their revolutionary role.
To see the productivity of society in the image of life’s “creativity” is at least as old as Marx, to believe in violence as a life-promoting force is at least as old as Nietzsche, and to think of creativity as man’s highest good is at least as old as Bergson.
Behavior and arguments in interest conflicts are not notorious for their “rationality.” Nothing, unfortunately, has so constantly been refuted by reality as the credo of “enlightened self-interest,” in its literal version as well as in its more sophisticated Marxian variant. On the contrary, it goes against the very nature of self-interest to be enlightened.
To expect people, who have not the slightest notion of what the res publica, the public thing, is, to behave nonviolently and argue rationally in matters of interest is neither realistic nor reasonable.
Sometimes violence is the only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation. To ask the impossible in order to obtain the possible is not always counterproductive.
Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.