Vol. 7 · No. 1 · 2001 · pp. 69-80 (12)

A Response to Hannah Arendt's Critique Of Sartre's Views on Violence

Rivca Gordon

Download full article (50 KB) [subscribers only]

Abstract

Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenal - speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary imprisonments - all to no avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

In her essay On Violence (1970), Hannah Arendt criticizes what she calls Sartre's 'new faith' of violence. She argues that his call to the oppressed peoples to turn to a violent struggle to achieve freedom from colonialisation is an idea that was not known in the history of revolutions. In addition, Sartre's glorification of violence is totally opposed to the Hegelian and Marxian tradition, and to any 'leftist humanism'. Therefore, Sartre should be included, she holds, among 'the new militants' or 'the new preachers of violence' of the New Left. To support her views, Arendt criticizes passages in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.