Violence and Political Theory by Frazer Elizabeth & Hutchings Kimberly

Violence and Political Theory by Frazer Elizabeth & Hutchings Kimberly

Author:Frazer, Elizabeth & Hutchings, Kimberly [Frazer, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509536733
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00


5

The Problem of Violence

Introduction

The philosophers analysed in the previous two chapters are far from being politically disengaged. Nevertheless, they consider the concept and the phenomenon of violence from a reflective vantage point, outside the immediate context of political activism. Here we turn back, to a group of philosophers from an earlier historical period, when political engagement and direct action led the philosophical analysis to a much greater degree. As we shall see, they had already taken on board some of the paradoxes of violence that we have met in later philosophical works. In Chapter 1 we emphasised the theme of ambiguity in Beauvoir’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of violence in politics. In this chapter we will find less ambiguity, but decidedly much more ambivalence. Three of the thinkers we analyse here – Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), and Emma Goldman (1869–1940) – were engaged directly in revolutionary politics. All three have a clear idea of the difference between violent and non-violent actions and relations. But whether violence is justified as a route to non-violent anarchy is a question that can generate only ambivalent answers.

Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) vision of anarchism has much in common with Bakunin’s, Kropotkin’s and Goldman’s, although there are differences (as there are, of course, between the first three). Tolstoy’s view is more individualist. By its very nature, individualism cannot be a revolutionary movement, because it always focuses on individual rebellion against authority (Graham, 2005: 145). Bakunin, Kropotkin and Goldman, by contrast, all focus on action in concert and on the possibility of non-coercive cooperation. Tolstoy can be classified as an absolutist pacifist – that is, a pacifist for whom any violence is absolutely forbidden. His pacifism, as we will see, rests on anarchist principles – in particular on the judgement of the evil nature of state authority – as well as on New Testament ethics and the individual’s absolute duty to ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39). The others are sceptical in the extreme about the very possibility, let alone desirability, of pacifism. Tolstoy proscribes any participation in politics – the competition against government for the power to govern inevitably involves violence. Further, any voluntary engagement at all with the government taints the actors with that government’s violence and leaves them compromised. On this point, all our four thinkers are united: competing for state power through party, parliamentary or revolutionary means is to take on for oneself the means and weapons of violence and oppression. Nevertheless, as we shall see, ambivalence about violence surfaces in Tolstoy’s work.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchism was associated with violence in several ways. Anarchist thought, anarchist propaganda, anarchist political effort and anarchist action developed and organised themselves; they were prominent in particular contexts of heightened social, political and state violence. Anarchist political organisation and action resisted legal orders and police regimes sought violently to repress incipient anarchism, real or imagined (Kropotkin, 1910/1995: 242; Miller, 1984: 111). These same regimes also focused on the so-called threats and dangers of socialism and anarchism.



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