In this timely study, Caroline Ashcroft reads Arendt’s work as an original source for reviving the thinking about violence in politics (p. 1). Her book challenges the predominant interpretations of the role of violence in Arendt as excluding violent acts from the sphere of politics proper. It argues that, for Arendt, violence can sometimes be legitimate, if it is justified in a democratic manner and employed for properly political ends (pp. 52, 75–77). Consequently, Ashcroft seeks not only to “deepen our understanding of Arendt’s conception of the role of violence in her political theory” (p. 2), but also to show how Arendt’s reflections on violence can develop our understanding of the political itself (p. 2).

This book is a work of intellectual history, based on a thorough analysis of the intellectual and political context of Arendt’s thinking about violence. It prioritizes “a political rather than philosophical reading of Arendt,” drawing on practical examples that Arendt analyzed in her reflections on violence (p. 13). The volume is divided into two parts. Chapters 1 to 5 draw a distinction between the legitimate uses of violence, which rely on “the limited violence of the work sphere,” and the illegitimate, “cyclical, unrestrained” violence inherent in the idea of sovereignty and the social (p. 126). Chapters 6 and 7, in turn, trace how this distinction speaks to practical dilemmas of politics, from both Arendt’s time and ours. Whereas chapter 6 provides a new perspective on Arendt’s thoughts on civil disobedience in the 1960s, chapter 7 develops contemporary theories of agonism.

Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt amounts to a compelling exploration of the ways that violence and politics are not only negatively but also positively related to each other (p. 82). Although it rightly emphasizes that, for Arendt, violence can have legitimate political uses, it goes too far in implying that Arendt believed violence can be positively political or politically creative (p. 134). For instance, Ashcroft argues that Arendt’s call for the creation of the Jewish army during World War II represents an example of a “genuinely political, not prepolitical” use of violence, and that its political character lies in “making a people” (pp. 67–68). Similarly, the author argues that Arendt accepted violence in the case of the American Revolution because it was employed with the political purpose of creating a space for politics, whereas in the French Revolution, violence was purely destructive or liberatory (p. 21).

These arguments collapse the important distinction between the negative and positive role of violence and raise difficult questions about the relationship between action and work in Arendt’s thought. In Ashcroft’s reading, violence is politically relevant when related to the political aspect of making politics, such as the violence used to create, stabilize, or conserve the political sphere through constitution and legislation. This claim presupposes that work can “realise political ends” in a way that does not diminish the political world, even “if it does entail some degree of violence” (p. 237). Arendt certainly believed that use objects were relevant to action—not only to serve as its foundation or ensure stability, but as meaningful worldly realities inspiring us to judge how the world should look and to respond in word and deed (Patchen Markell, “Arendt’s Work,” College Literature 38[1], 2011, pp. 35–36). But she also thought that it is a dangerous mistake to interpret politics itself as an activity that can be made.

By the same token, although violence may be required for the sake of opening or protecting a space for politics—for instance, to give voice to previously disregarded perspectives—it is a fallacy to think that a resort to violent means could realize public freedom or constitute a political community. When Arendt called for the formation of a Jewish army, the political use of violence was limited to the Jews affirming their willingness to fight for their freedom, thereby becoming a part of Europe’s common struggle for freedom and equality (Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 2007, pp. 137, 141–42). At the same time, she was clear that the new political community could only be established through the free confrontation of differences among a plurality of Jewish groupings (Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 2007, pp. 143–44, 171–75, 333). Similarly, what Arendt praised about the American Revolution was that the founding of the new republic was grounded in the power potential of “mutual promise and common deliberation” rather than in sovereignty and rule over others—even though the liberation from foreign rule was achieved through armed rebellion (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 2006, pp. 206, 226–27). In contrast, in the French Revolution, violence was put in the service of realizing natural, supposedly universal principles of justice, attempting to fashion a plural people in the image of a unified general will of the nation and lapsing into terror (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 2006, pp. 50, 196–98, 151). In this light, Ashcroft’s focus on the positive role of violence risks undermining its aim to discriminate between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence. To be sure, Ashcroft emphasizes that the politically creative violence of work must be based on (and limited by) the plurality of political power. Yet, given that such violence is justified in terms of realizing a pre-given end (for example, a certain vision of a political community), there remains little space to critically evaluate its effects on the intersubjective character of the world—as well as to discern when violent means might turn against the end that they were supposed to help us attain.

Nevertheless, this book nicely demonstrates how the insights into the political uses of violence help us find in Arendt a “more expansive” notion of civil disobedience that is not necessarily wedded to nonviolence or constitutionalism but that encompasses “a variety of political revolutionary activity” (p. 184). Ashcroft perceptively argues that the problem that Arendt discerns in the Black Power movement was not simply the use of violence, but the way in which violence was justified and carried out. Still—beyond the assertion that violence should always be used for political ends (p. 172)—the analysis begs the question of how “the rage of the disaffected and excluded” (p. 201) might be engaged politically and channeled to recognize the political limits of violence.

A similar omission colors the discussion in the last chapter, which deals with the question of “how real physical spaces of action” are constituted in the real world of politics (p. 202). Arendt’s thoughts on the political uses of violence draw attention to political practices that “go beyond” discursive processes of debate and negotiation (p. 232). The analysis enjoins us to face up to situations in which violence may be necessary to protect the freedom and plurality of politics and to do so in a way that “does not place the public sphere itself under threat” (p. 233). Here, the book raises but ultimately sidesteps the question of how the distinction between political and nonpolitical forms of violence could be used to confront the embodied, structural workings of violence that cannot be transcended through either consensus-based or agonistic discourse.

Given the pervasiveness of systemic violence, the ability to distinguish between uses of violence in politics is not only important theoretically but carries profound practical significance. By unearthing the present political import of Arendt’s thoughts on violence, Ashcroft has started a conversation that should not be ignored.