Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975)

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt's conception of power is distinctive. It is rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. Arendt believed power is actualized where people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is that power is consensual, referring to humans acting in concert. Power is never the property of an individual but of the groups acting together.

Arendt is quite self-conscious in rejecting standard assumptions about power, arguing that political scientists and theorists have obscured its nature ever since Plato. Regardless of political orientation, thinkers have assumed that the first question of politics is, “Who rules whom?” Arendt's rejection of this assumption may seem idealistic, utopian, or simply incredible. It is, however, offered by an author whose first major work was a three-volume study of totalitarianism, a work that entertains no illusions about violence, terror, and domination and that remains one of the landmarks of 20th-century political science. Nevertheless, in developing her account of power, Arendt firmly insists on James Madison's maxim, “All governments rest on opinion”—and not, therefore, on qualities that we more often associate with power, such as rulership or coercion. She even claims that violence is a “marginal phenomenon” in the political realm, which may look like a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that “opinion” forms the basis of government. Though seemingly eccentric, these claims are based on profound reflections about the nature of politics.

Arendt's basic criticism of the political science of her day concerned its failure to make distinctions. Accordingly, she distinguishes power from a series of concepts that political science often refers to under that name—violence, rulership, and authority (not to mention force and sheer strength). Although these concepts may appear functionally alike, inasmuch as each may involve one person doing something that another wants or expects that person to do, Arendt nonetheless discerns crucial differences. The next part of this entry considers her thoughts on power rather than violence, before turning to the more elusive notion of authority. (More elusive partly because Arendt's most obvious discussion of authority [“What is Authority?”] is largely historical and fits awkwardly with her later comments in “On Violence.” This entry touches only on the latter.)

[Page 27]Arendt draws two main contrasts between power and violence. Although power is, in a sense that we will return to, “an end-in-itself,” violence is primarily instrumental. That is, violence is justified in human relations as a means to secure particular ends, and it is more justifiable as a means, the nearer and more certain those ends are. However, Arendt continually underlines the unpredictability of political action, violent and nonviolent, and the role played by sheer accident in human affairs. Thinking of Plato's metaphors of rulership—the philosopherking who “makes” the ideal republic as the crafts-person makes a table—she writes, “Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals” (1972, p. 106). Thus, Arendt does not deny that violence may have many effects on the political realm, but trenchantly observes that the most likely change violence makes is to a world where the exercise of violence becomes more usual. No matter how limited, strategic, or effective violence may be, its instrumentality sharply marks it off from power. “Far from being the means to an end, [power] is actually the very condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of the means-end category” (1972, p. 150). That is, there is power wherever people cooperate to pursue shared ends and wherever they address the question, What ends will we act in concert to pursue? As Arendt contends, any answer to the question, “To what end is power a means?” will either be vacuous (“to enable men to live together”) or dangerously utopian (“to promote happiness or to realise a classless society”—1972, p. 150f). Thus for Arendt, power does not call for any justification because it is bound up with the very existence of political communities.

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