Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence
| Author | Kimberly Hutchings,Elizabeth Frazer |
| Published date | 01 April 2007 |
| Date | 01 April 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885107074349 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Argument and Rhetoric in the
Justification of Political
Violence
Elizabeth Frazer University of Oxford
Kimberly Hutchings London School of Economics
abstract: In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war
theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in
politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt,
Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument,
deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from
virtue. All of these arguments raise problems of validity. However, we find that they
are reinforced by the representation of violence in terms of a specific aesthetic, either
tragedy or sublimity, and by certain rhetorical textual strategies. We conclude that the
persuasive force of these arguments for violence rests as much, if not more, on
aesthetics and rhetoric, as it does on argument.
key words: Beauvoir, Fanon, justification, Merleau-Ponty, politics, persuasion, rhetoric,
Schmitt, Sorel, violence, Weber
Introduction
The question of the role of violence is central to analytical and normative
accounts of politics.1There are literatures, for example religious and liberal paci-
fisms, in which violence is presented as both morally wrong and pathological for
politics. Just war theory starts from the premise that violence is an evil, to be
justified in politics only in carefully specified circumstances.2In this article, how-
ever, we are concerned with those strands of western political thought in which
violence is presented as part of ‘politics as usual’. In her essay ‘On Violence’,
Arendt castigated western political thought for its misleading conflation of politi-
cal power with violence. Her critique targeted defences of the political authority
180
article
Contact address: Elizabeth Frazer, Department of Politics and International Relations,
University of Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK.
Email: elizabeth.frazer@new.ox.ac.uk
Kimberly Hutchings, Department of International Relations, London School of
Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: K.Hutchings@lse.ac.uk
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 6(2)180–199
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885107074349]
of the state offered by thinkers such as Max Weber, and the revolutionary argu-
ments of thinkers such as Georges Sorel.3Our purpose in this article is, following
Arendt’s lead, to examine the ways in which Weber and Sorel and a group of
related thinkers, writing in the early to mid-20th century, account for their claim
that politics is inextricable from violence. The point of this exercise is not to prove
or disprove the claim that politics and violence go together, rather we are con-
cerned to identify and clarify the mechanisms through which the claim that
violence and politics go together is rendered plausible in the texts of both statist
and revolutionary theorists.
In addition to Weber and Sorel, we draw on the writings of Carl Schmitt,
Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon.4In spite of their
theoretical and ideological differences, all of these thinkers have certain things in
common. They all share a distrust of moralistic liberalism and are responding to
the politics of modern liberal capitalist states in their work. Weber and Sorel are
significant influences on Schmitt and existentialism. Fanon, in turn, is influenced
by the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir. For our purposes, however,
the most significant commonality between these thinkers is that they all argue for
a politics in which violence plays an important role.
In order to get to grips with how these thinkers convince us (their readers) of
the link between politics and violence, we begin by focusing on the ways in which
the link is explicitly justified. The most obvious of these arguments is the familiar
one, that violence is ‘instrumental’ for politics because it is an effective means for
achieving political ends.5However, on examination, it is clear that this mode
of justification falls foul (as is acknowledged by the thinkers in question) of the
problematic relationship between means and ends. This may be because of the
sheer unpredictability of action, or because of the more complex issue that means
and ends cannot be understood or evaluated independently of one another.6
Although none of the thinkers resolves these difficulties with instrumental reason-
ing, they do not abandon their claim to the instrumentality of violence, but rather
bolster it with supplementary arguments of other kinds: arguments from ‘neces-
sity’ and arguments from ‘virtue’.
Necessity arguments come in two main forms: conceptual and empirical. In
conceptual necessity arguments the meaning of ‘political’ is analytically linked to
‘violence’. Behind such conceptual analyses, though, we find anthropological
assertions – violence is a simple fact about the world, either as a kind of ‘anthro-
pological universal’ or as a matter of structural context. Clearly such arguments
are highly contestable. However, even if one sets this contestability on one side,
the problem with such necessity arguments is that it would follow that all violence
perpetuated in connection with political power is equally necessary or factual. In
response to this unpalatable inference, and to the problems with instrumentalism
already outlined, our thinkers further defend the place of violence in politics
through drawing distinctions between virtuous and vicious violence. Here we
find particular modes of violence in politics justified in terms of the values and 181
Frazer & Hutchings: Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence
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