Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power

Hannah Arendt on the Concept of Power by Pat Duffy Hutcheon

My first and only personal encounter with Hannah Arendt was when she came to speak to the students at Yale University in 1968 while I was studying sociology there. As always, she was questioning the conventional wisdom of the times. At that time -- at the height of the Vietnam War crisis -- she stood solidly with the student protesters. Nevertheless, during that visit she sounded a warning against the popular obsession with unlimited "sovereignty" of either the individual or the collective, and with violence as a favored vehicle for both entities in their pursuit of social change. She let us know how much she deplored the glorification of violence by many students, and their glib talk -- from privileged and protected enclaves in the Western world -- of the "necessity" for violent revolution. For this she blamed what she saw as the malevolent influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. She felt (rightly, I now believe) that these writers and other significant opinion setters among the young were then sowing the seeds for which the whole world would one day reap the whirlwind.

On power and violence

This was a book summary we found on http://www.fsmitha.com/review/arendt.html and we believe it is a good starting point on the discussion of how social organization leads to power, from coexistence with other powers will come conflict, and how can conflict be managed so power is not lost at the stage where coexistence of powers is impossible.  Also under what conditions can there be no conflicting powers and therefore avoidance of conflict and violence.  Could comments here start an open and public discussion?  In political circles this subject is systematically overseen and avoided.

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On Violence

Author: Hannah Arendt

A Harvest Book, 1970

In Arendt's own words:

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.
There are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades [the 1950s and '60s] ... they reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences.