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

Abstract

Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent weapons in our arsenalspeeches, 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

The Regime of Violence in Socialist and Postsocialist Poland

“…This absence is particularly noticeable in Arendt's (1970) On Violence, where she misreads Sartre's position on violence (Gordon 2001). 3 Without a notion of structural violence, the "counter-violence" that Sartre (2001) accepted in his preface to Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and elsewhere becomes, for Arendt, the initial violence, when in fact the opposite is true.…”