In this book, Dustin Ells Howes offers a rich and powerful retort to the ascendance of what might be called “the ethics of political violence” (EPV) and, in particular, its adoption in liberal and republican thought. By EPV I mean the spectrum of theories positing that violence might sometimes be necessary and, in those circumstances, sometimes morally justified, notably in the political practices of rule, war, and revolution. Given this assumption, participants in the EPV also commonly take it for granted that there is a meaningful and useful distinction to be made between justifiable and unjustifiable uses of violence in politics. The central target of Howes’s critique is the close relationship that the EPV has established between violence and freedom. Crucially, he argues, it has come to be seen as axiomatic in modern Western political thought that the value of freedom can justify the resort to physical violence. Howes wants us to reject this belief and to turn instead to intellectual resources from outside mainstream Western political thought in order to think about the themes of freedom and violence anew.

By carefully setting out and pursuing this line of inquiry, Howes performs a service that I think vital to a sufficiently critical and reflexive debate on the merits of violence as a political instrument. Too often, work in the liberal tradition narrows the focus on war and political violence in a way that is vulnerable to the accusation that insufficient time has been spent thinking imaginatively about the alternatives. And the belief that violence actually can improve security both of bodies and liberties is often assumed rather than interrogated. Howes puts it up to liberal proponents of the EPV to reflect carefully on these assumptions and question them. Like me, they might not be entirely persuaded by his argument, but they will undoubtedly benefit from engaging critically with it. It is in this spirit that I will suggest some lines of response as I outline the key claims of this important book.

Howes argues that freedom is widely thought to justify violence in three different ways. Violence is seen, first, as a necessary means of securing freedom when revolutionaries overthrow their oppressors. And second, when the free states they thereby create fight the external and internal enemies who threaten them, violence is justifiably used to defend freedom. Third, violence may be seen as a way of expressing freedom. More prominent in strands of nationalist and socialist thought, this possibility also arises when liberals and republicans need to legitimate their states by reference to a common national identity, and especially when this is projected outward toward other “unfree” states. Although the ideas both of justified force and freedom may be found in ancient sources, Howes argues, only in modern political thought do we see the two generally coupled together in these ways: “The dominant ideologies of the last two hundred years,” as he argues, “not only assert that violence is necessary to attain freedom but insist that the historical record tells us that freedom can only be attained through violence” (p. 4; emphasis added). Let us call this the “necessary violence assumption” (NVA).

Howes’s case against the NVA is built out of four methodologically distinct arguments. The first is that “historical and empirical evidence demonstrates that nonviolence is a more effective and more consistent means to liberation than violence” (p. 162). As leading examples, he discusses the revolutions in eighteenth-century America, France, and Haiti, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. All bear “[t]he hallmarks of liberation sought through violence [which] are temporary triumph followed by eventual failure, leading to freedom that in practice looks more like slavery, and solidarity that is imperilled by recrimination and assassination” (pp. 13–14). By contrast, when the abolitionists of the nineteenth century and Civil Rights campaigners of the twentieth resolved to abstain from violence, they were able to maintain greater depth and consistency in their commitments to equality and respect and better political results in the long run.

The general point Howes wants us to take about the risks of taking up violence as a means may be right, but I thought two issues worth raising about the claim as he states it. The first concerns its meaning. If we are to take from it that, all else being equal, nonviolence is better at achieving freedom than violence, then I doubt many proponents of the EPV would disagree. But then it leaves standing the possibility that where all else is not equal, violence might sometimes be a legitimate resort, which is what I take Howes to be questioning. On the other hand, if his argument is that empirical evidence “demonstrates” that nonviolence is always the better option, regardless of circumstances, then I am much more doubtful. This is my second issue: Howes’s examples are both numerically insufficient to exclude categorically the possibility that violence might sometimes be justified, and they are also substantively ambiguous. The negative outcomes of historic revolutions are likely to have been products of a variety of factors and not just one. It seems at least equally plausible to suppose that even had the revolutionaries avoided violence, the moral contradictions inherent in their ideological worldviews, as Howes describes them (or contradictions between avowed beliefs and self-interest, for instance in the case of American revolutionaries who owned slaves), would have vitiated the outcomes regardless.

Howes’s second argument is that modern political thought’s commitment to the NVA has been shaped by a questionable interpretation of key passages in ancient history and mythology. In the seminal Discourses on Livy, for instance, the plebs of the early Roman Republic illustrate Machiavelli’s claim that by arming the people, legislators may counterbalance the patricians’ persistent attempts to subvert liberty. For Howes, by contrast, Livy teaches a different lesson. Rather than threatening the patricians directly, it was the plebs’ withdrawal of voluntary military service that proved their power, when they seceded from the city during a crisis and refused to defend them. Rather than demonstrating the efficacy of arms, therefore, this bloodless secession was a case of nonviolent power. Likewise, the stories of Lucretia’s suicide and of Verginius killing his daughter both illustrate not the potential to use violence against rapists and others who would strip people of their liberty, but of “self-sacrifice as the critical means for maintaining freedom” (p. 51).

Howes’s instincts here may be right: that the liberal-republican faith in violence has been shaped by archetypal images and historical (or mythic) paradigms. I had doubts, however, about how effective his “lost histories” (p. 163) were in offering an alternative. The point about plebeian power having more to do with their capacity for political mobilization and divestment than their ability to assert strength through direct violence was well taken. But the fact is that its effectiveness was parasitical on the violent threat posed by others. The plebs coerced their domestic enemies by indirect violence, mediated through the agency of external enemies. Likewise, the stories of Lucretia and, above all, the killing of Verginia (not to mention the slaying of the sons of Brutus) struck me as ambiguous on the salience of violence, particularly since in two of them, liberty was asserted through the killing of others.

I address Howes’s third and fourth moves as a pair. On the one hand, he argues that the dominant conceptions of freedom upheld by Western liberalism have been shaped in such a way as to make freedom (seemingly) inseparable from violence. On the other, he sets himself the task of articulating an alternative conception of “nonviolent” freedom that could offer an escape from embedded ways of thinking.

For Howes, John Locke is the exemplary and seminal figure in the binding of freedom to violence at a conceptual level. Whereas Hobbes had dismissed republican arguments about liberty and asserted that security from violent death ought to be the state’s paramount concern, Locke’s move was to reassert freedom but to collapse it into bodily security. Not only is avoiding being killed necessary in order to enjoy liberty; it is necessary to assert and defend one’s liberty in order to avoid violent death. Even ostensibly minor encroachments on the freedom of the individual, Locke argued, might escalate if left unchecked. Consequently, a state founded for the purposes of protecting individual lives would be tasked with exercising its power to kill even for the sake of freedom.

I share Howes’s concern about the tendency in Locke to conflate different types of threat. But where Howes and I disagree is on the question of whether we can address the permissiveness arising from Locke’s theory through critique and refinement within the EPV. Howes’s view is that “the dominant ideologies of western political thought have been unable to disentangle the striving for freedom from the practice of violence.” Attempts to challenge torture and other wrongs from within any of these positions, therefore, inevitably fail because “the basic premise that freedom can be defended through the violence of the state continually generates such ‘excesses’” (p. 197). My feeling, by contrast, is that Howes is too quick to dismiss modern, Western political thought as a whole. It seems to me to have sufficient richness to be able to address the excesses that some strands within it undoubtedly have done much to legitimize.

I am nevertheless sympathetic to the author’s quest for additional resources either from outside Euro-American political thinking, chiefly in the practices of Mahatma Gandhi, or from strands of thought that it has buried or marginalized. The constructive part of Howes’s project is to sketch a conception of freedom that will not regenerate violent tendencies, whether in the form of the sovereign state or other forms of political “rule” that assert themselves through dominion over foreign peoples (a signature feature, Howes thinks, both of classical Greek and modern liberal-republican freedom). He argues that Gandhi’s idea of Swaraj (amplified here through an interesting comparison with Hannah Arendt’s thought) offers the most promising starting point. It prizes both the spontaneity and the imagination needed to resist overhasty claims about the “necessity” of violence.

Whether nonviolence can entirely obviate the need for violence is a matter of conjecture and I remain doubtful, but what Howes’s account does convey is the potential to draw on an expanded range of nonviolent methods in the face of threat. His synthesis of Arendtian and Gandhian thought offers promising suggestions about how a commitment to freedom may be best served in many cases by an indirect approach to oppression and international aggression. It might combine divestment from structures that facilitate these evils, for instance, with an approach to self-rule that concentrates on education rather than domination, coercion, and control.

As I say, I think liberal-republican thought offers more potential for critiquing the use of violence than Howes allows. But Freedom without Violence offers a theoretically sophisticated, erudite, and highly suggestive retort to the lazy assumption that liberty simply and uncontroversially justifies violence. Theorists of the ethics of violence would do well to engage closely with it.