Shakespeare Between Machiavelli and Hobbes by Moore Andrew;

Author:Moore, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Opposite of Violence

I have been making the case that Shakespeare’s political thought trends toward the modern, and particularly toward political materialism. Here, I would like to apply a very severe test to Shakespeare’s political theory by setting it up against a modern account of the relationship between politics and violence—Hannah Arendt’s 1970 work, On Violence—so that we can see the similarities. In On Violence Arendt opposes the easy conflation of power and violence and she refuses to concede that “violence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power,” a position which she claims is almost unanimously endorsed by “political theorists from Left to Right.”[3] She argues such a conflation is the result of lazy thinking—a failure to seriously analyze the differences between two related but fundamentally different human activities. She goes so far as to claim that “Power and violence are opposites.”[4] Power, according to Arendt,

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, from which the power originated to begin with . . . disappears, “his power” also vanishes.[5]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.