Violence and Political Theory

Elizabeth Frazer, Kimberly Hutchings

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509536733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Is politics necessarily violent? Does the justifiability of violence depend on whether it is perpetrated to defend or upend the existing order – or perhaps on the way in which it is conducted? Is violence simply direct physical harm, or can it also be structural, symbolic, or epistemic? In this book, Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberley Hutchings explore how political theorists, from Niccolo Machiavelli to Elaine Scarry, have addressed these issues. They engage with both defenders and critics of violence in politics, analysing their diverse justificatory and rhetorical strategies in order to draw out the enduring themes of these debates. They show how political theorists have tended to evade the central difficulties raised by violence by either reducing it to a neutral tool or identifying it with something quite distinct, such as justice or virtue. They argue that, because violence is necessarily wrapped up with hierarchical and exclusive structures and imaginaries, legitimising it in terms of the ends that it serves, or how it is perpetrated, no longer makes sense. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars in areas ranging from the ethics of terror and war to radical and revolutionary political thought.

1
Politics and Revolutionary Violence

Introduction

In this chapter we focus attention on how certain political theorists have thought about political violence in the context of revolutionary change. The idea that the violent overthrow of tyranny may be justified has a long and variegated history. The thinkers we consider in this chapter differ in their historical contexts and ideological commitments, but they all engage with the role of violence in relation to progressive political change. We look first at John Locke, who is frequently identified as one precursor to modern liberalism, then at thinkers influenced by, and reacting to, Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s reading of Jacobinism and of the French Revolution – specifically Georges Sorel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. We examine the way they address key questions about how to define and differentiate politics and violence and how to draw the line between justifiable and unjustifiable violence. Their answers, we argue, raise a variety of problems and paradoxes and introduce us to a political theory repertoire of argumentative and rhetorical strategies for negotiating them.

John Locke (1632–1704)

Locke is closely associated with the English revolution of 1688.¹ The deposition of King James II of England and VII of Scotland and the accession of the Dutch Protestant William III were followed by the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1689. These events have been known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, but also as ‘the Bloodless Revolution’, a misnomer because, along with anti-Catholic rioting in England, there was fighting with cruelty and fatalities in Ireland and Scotland (Macaulay, 1906: chs 8–13; Pincus, 2006). At the time there was a proliferation of alternative, competing and contesting accounts, interventions and arguments about these events – in books, pamphlets, and sermons. There was controversy about whether James had abdicated or merely deserted the throne, about whether William could be invited or elected, and so on. The consensus, in contemporaneous deliberations about those events, was to avoid the radical language of violence or civil war, popular sovereignty or power and instead to find pacific formulations about ‘a vacant throne’ and the procedures by which the post, as it were, might be filled. Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government before the 1688 revolution, but the Second Treatise was interpreted retrospectively, as providing an ideological justification for the right of peoples to overthrow their rulers in certain circumstances.

Locke’s first and second treatises are notable for the insistent recurrence of the idea that political power is power of life and death. In the First Treatise (T1) this concept of political power is repeated in order to establish that Robert Filmer’s (1588–1653) account of monarchical authority as derived from the power of Adam cannot be correct, since God did not give Adam the power of life and death over wives, children and servants (Locke, T1: ch. IV, s. 67; also ss. 8–10, 41–2, 48, 51–6 in chs II, IV, V and VI; Filmer, 1680/1991). This political power is grounded in the natural state, in which everyone has the right to do what is needed in prosecution of the (natural) law (Locke, T2: ch. II, s. 7). In a state of nature everyone has the power to ‘retribute . . . what is proportionate to . . . transgression’ (Locke T2: ch. II, s. 8). This natural power to punish is politicised when it is placed into the hands of the community. Political society exists when, and only when, every one of its members ‘hath quitted this natural Power’ to punish offences. The individual, crucially, resigns the natural power to punish ‘in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it’ (T2: ch. VII, s. 87). That is to say, members of the political society, living under the political power of legislation and punishment, do not wholly forgo their natural right to punish. This is held, as it were, in reserve. People are subject to political power only by consent. By consent, they can be ‘incorporated, and make one Body Politick, wherein the Majority have a Right to act and conclude the rest’ (T2: ch. VIII, s. 95).

Political power contrasts with ‘despotical’ power. Despotic power is not given by nature, nor can it be constructed through compact or agreement. It is ‘an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases’ (T2: ch. XV, s. 172). Locke explains that despotical power is the effect of ‘Forfeiture, which the Aggressor makes of his own Life, when he puts himself into the state of War with another’. It is the power that is accrued by the injured party, together with the rest of mankind, when an aggressor renounces ‘the way of peace’. Despotical power is therefore rightful, although it is neither natural nor agreed. The aggressor

has no right, and so revolting from his own kind to that of Beasts by making Force which is theirs, to be his rule of right, he renders himself liable to be destroied by the injur’d person and the rest of mankind, that will joyn with him in the execution of Justice, as any other wild beast, or noxious brute, with whom Mankind can have neither Society nor Security. (T2: ch. XV, s. 172)

In Locke’s view, it is when a ruler becomes an aggressor, effectively making war upon the political community, that it becomes acceptable for the rest of society to make war on him in return. If an arbitrary ruler unleashes war upon the citizens, then they are back in the equivalent of a natural state in relation to that ruler and may act accordingly. Violence, then, has a complex position in Locke’s political theory. It is politicised; but politicisation means the relocation of violence, not its elimination. And, when politics fails, violence comes back on the scene bearing a pre-political meaning, invoked by Locke as approximating a war of extermination more closely than judicial punishment:

one may destroy a Man who makes War upon him, or has discovered an Enmity to his being, for the same Reason, that he may kill a Wolf or a Lyon; because such Men are not under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence, and so may be treated as Beasts of Prey. (T2: ch. III, s. 16)

There are many debates on the place of violence in Locke’s political theory; some of them more closely than others identify his arguments with modern liberalism.² Two points are particularly significant. First, although it is tempting to assimilate Locke to a tradition that sees political power as antithetical to violence, Locke himself tells us that political power is violent at its source. Second, the special right to destroy the tyrant who puts himself at war with the people is a right to use despotic power.³ Despotical power is not itself political. A state of war is a state in which people are not tied together by the common law of reason; rather they are ruled only by force and violence. So in this state humans may be treated as ‘beasts of prey’ (T2: ch. III, s. 16). The state of war and the state of nature are quite distinct, yet they are analogous to each other in that in both there are human beings who are treated as if they were wild beasts (T2: ch. III, ss. 11, 16, 9). Despotic power is effective when political power, properly speaking, is exhausted. It is also effective when political power is dissolved – as in those cases where the prince replaces the laws with his own will, acts contrary to trust, subjects the commonwealth to a foreign power, abandons his office and so on (T2: chs XVIII, XIX; Baumgold, 1993: 17).

The threat from a lion or wolf is self-evidently a beastly threat, which justifies the threatened person in killing. ‘Man’ and beast are effectively in a state of nature. A thief who uses force is unpredictable; the victim has no way of knowing whether the thief will be at all restrained in his violence. Victim and thief are effectively in a state of war, and it is therefore lawful for someone who lives in a commonwealth to kill the criminal who uses force or violence (T2: ch. III, s. 18). All these examples are set out by Locke so that he may insist on the analogy with the arbitrary, excessive or tyrannical governor. ‘He who attempts to get another Man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him; It being to be understood as a Declaration of a Design upon his Life’ (T2: ch. III, s. 17). Further violence is used, and injury done, also by those who are appointed to administer justice. When this happens, sufferers are effectively in a state of war, no matter how the violence is ‘colour’d with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law’ (T2: ch. III, s. 20). Resistance – including violent resistance, and even the exertion of the ‘power of life and death’ – is rightful in all these cases. This just violence derives from and enforces natural law and serves to defeat brutality.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)

Locke’s political imagination of revolution and of revolutionary violence is situated in seventeenth-century Britain. It envisages revolution as the disposal of tyranny and the reinstatement of legal and political order, rather than as the wholesale transformation of political community. In the French and Haitian revolutions a century later, violence is accounted for in interactional vocabularies of punishment and war that echo Locke’s thinking, plus a new discourse. This is a discourse of nature – in the sense of natural forces rather than Locke’s natural state – in which the violence of the people and of the revolutionary state is likened to floods and volcanoes, which react to and transform the subterranean violence of the previous political landscape (Miller, 2011). Such revolutionary events opened up new possibilities for the political imagination (Finlay, 2006; Harris, 1974; Stedman Jones, 2008). Tyrannical violence was no longer about the lapse of individuals into bestiality but about the inherent, unjust violence of a particular mode of economic, political and social organisation. This is structural or systemic rather than direct violence, as captured in Friedrich Engels’s early characterisation of the murderous violence of the factory system and wage labour in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

If one individual inflicts a bodily injury upon another which leads to the death of the person attacked we call it manslaughter; on the other hand, if the attacker knows beforehand that the blow will be fatal we call it murder. Murder has also been committed if society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably come to premature and unnatural ends. Their death is as violent as if they had been stabbed or shot. (Engels, 1845/1969: 108)

Marx and Engels interpreted the role of violence in revolution in the light of their reading of the English Civil War and 1688, and most importantly of the French Revolution (Marx, 1852/1973: 148). For them, all of these revolutions were the political manifestation of an underlying shift in economic class relations. They established the political dominance of the bourgeoisie in a world that was already in the process of social transformation from feudalism to capitalism. The French Revolution was particularly significant for their analysis because of the ways in which it demonstrated how revolutionary violence was a necessary response to the violence of the ancien régime. It also suggested the various stages through which the revolution needed to pass in order to ensure a victory for the bourgeoisie. Speaking of successive parties taking power in the course of the 1789 revolution, Marx comments:

As soon as it had brought the revolution to the point where it was unable to follow it any further, let alone advance ahead of it, it was pushed aside by the bolder ally standing behind it and sent to the guillotine. In this way the revolution moved in an ascending path. (Marx, 1852/1973: 169)

The French Revolution, its accompanying war and terror, and the role of Jacobinism, became reference points against which Marx and Engels judged the revolutions of their own era. ‘For the first time in the revolutionary movement of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation encircled by a numerically superior counterrevolution has dared to oppose craven counter-revolutionary fury with revolutionary passion to oppose white terror with red terror’ (Engels, 1849/1973: 213). However, it would be misleading to see Marx and Engels as identifying violence as key to the revolution. Their experience of 1848 – the year of a number of uprisings in Europe – and their conviction that political transformation followed social transformation meant that they regarded the potential achievements of revolutionary violence as something less important than shifts in underlying social relations would be (Marx, 1847/1994: 184). In their eyes, direct political violence is a response to the structural violence and consequent class struggle embedded in capitalism. ‘Mortal conflict’ between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is already inscribed in capitalist social relations (Marx and Engels, 1848/1996: 29). This violence manifests itself periodically as directly repressive or revolutionary violence, in which political actors explicitly use violence to further their class interests. Revolutionary violence will eventually enable the insurgent proletariat to take over the state and to institute a dictatorship, but only in order to complete the transformation of the existing relations of production and to move beyond the state form altogether (Marx, 1875/1996: 222). Violence may be necessary, but it is secondary to the class interests it reflects and enforces. This view is expressed in particular by Engels, in his later work, where he insists that economics is the primary cause of violence and hence we must accept violence as an element in history (Engels, 1885/1934; Hewlett, 2012: 113–18).

Marx and Engels share with Locke a reading of revolutionary violence as embedded in the state of war. However, for Marx and Engels this is not the anarchic state of war that follows from the breakdown of legal and political order, but a class war structured by antithetical class interests. Rather than being the point at which violence is depoliticised, revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) violence is inherently political, it turns the implications of structural shifts in the relations of production into deliberate action – an action oriented to a new structure for economy and society. In the case of revolutionary violence, this is a direct assertion of freedom, in rebellion against the murderous constraints of the capitalist economic and social order. In this context revolutionary violence is not something to be explained and justified; it is rather an aspect of the radical transformation of a violently structured society, as had previously been seen in the bourgeois French Revolution.

Georges Sorel (1847–1922)

By using the French Revolution as the model for a radical transformation, Marx and Engels created a script for the role of violence in revolution that Marxist-influenced thinkers grappled with in theory and practice during the next century. Sorel lived, thought, wrote and acted in the context of developments in and controversies about the Marxist theory of revolution. On Marx’s and Engels’s account, government and politics are superficial epiphenomena of the forces and relations that drive social reality. The organisation into ‘sovereign’ monarchs, parliaments, governmental administration and all the rest is a way for certain social groups ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reflections on Politics and Violence
• 1 Politics and Revolutionary Violence
• 2 Politics and State Violence
• 3 Politics and Violence Reconsidered
• 4 Politics as a Continuation of Violence
• 5 The Problem of Violence
• 6 Violence and the Transformation of Man
• 7 The Politicisation of Violence
• 8 Towards a Political Theory of Violence
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement