The Refractory Legacy Of Algerian Decolonization
Revisiting Arendt on Violence

In this chapter I discuss Hannah Arendt's critique of revolutionary and anticolonial violence in her essay On Violence (1969), which makes a critical distinction between violence and legitimate political activity. It has often been assumed that Arendt's disquisition on the political dangers of violence was written in response to the growing militancy of the student movement and the appropriation of a rhetoric of violent revolution by the New Left in the United States, France, Germany, and other Western countries by the late 1960s. The Paris barricades of May 1968, the riots of that same year at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the emergence of the separatist Black Power movement catalyzed Arendt's desire in On Violence to discern and distinguish the "authentic" political demands of the student movement from its violent manifestations and the extremism of its "criminal elements."