Crises of the Republic

Overview

Two hundred and forty pages, four essays written between 1969 and 1971 and gathered by Hannah Arendt herself into a single volume published in 1972. She was in her mid-sixties, already the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem, and writing now directly into the political crisis of her own moment: the Vietnam War, the leaked Pentagon Papers exposing years of governmental deception about the war’s actual conduct and prospects, and the student protest movements that had, by the end of the 1960s, transformed American university life and American politics simultaneously.

The four pieces are distinct in occasion and form, an extended essay on the lies surrounding Vietnam, a defense of civil disobedience, a sustained theoretical argument distinguishing power from violence, and a closing interview, but together they constitute Arendt’s most direct and most politically engaged response to the specific crises of the American 1960s, applying the conceptual apparatus she had developed across her earlier, more historically and theoretically oriented work to the immediate events unfolding around her.

What happens

Lying in Politics. Prompted directly by the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department study revealing that successive administrations had systematically misrepresented the war’s progress and prospects to the American public for years, Arendt’s opening essay examines the specific mechanics of organized political deception at this scale.

Her analysis distinguishes ordinary political lying, a practice she treats as old as politics itself and not, on its own, unusually alarming, from a more troubling modern variant: image-making and what she calls problem-solving, in which policy is crafted not to respond to actual facts on the ground but to construct and maintain a preferred image of the war’s progress for both foreign and domestic audiences, with actual military and political decisions increasingly subordinated to the requirements of image management rather than the reverse. Her most striking claim is that this kind of large-scale, sustained deception becomes self-undermining over time, since the deceivers, operating within their own manufactured picture of reality for long enough, eventually lose the capacity to distinguish their own constructed image from the facts, and begin making consequential decisions based on the fiction they created rather than the reality it was meant to obscure.

Civil Disobedience. Written partly in response to a controversial acquittal of student protesters and partly as a broader intervention into ongoing debates about the legitimacy of organized lawbreaking as political protest, this essay develops a defense of civil disobedience considerably more institutionally grounded than the more purely individual, conscience-based justification associated with Thoreau.

Arendt argues that civil disobedience, properly understood, is not fundamentally an act of individual conscience refusing complicity with an unjust law, but rather a form of organized, public, collective action by a committed minority acting in concert, closely related to and continuous with the American tradition of voluntary association that Tocqueville had identified as central to American civic life more than a century earlier. Read this way, civil disobedients are not outlaws standing entirely outside the political system but participants in a recognizably political practice, deserving of a distinct legal and political status rather than simple criminal prosecution, since what they are doing, openly, publicly and with acceptance of legal consequence, differs fundamentally in kind from ordinary criminal lawbreaking undertaken for private advantage and concealment.

On Violence. The collection’s theoretically most ambitious and most frequently cited essay, and the piece for which the volume is now best remembered. Arendt sets out to correct what she regards as a widespread and consequential conceptual confusion running through both left and right political rhetoric of her moment, the treatment of power and violence as simply different points along a single continuum, with violence understood as merely the most extreme or intense form of power.

Against this, she insists the two are genuinely distinct phenomena, opposites rather than variations of the same thing. Power, in her technical definition, is the human capacity to act in concert, generated only when people come together and act jointly, and sustained only for as long as that joint action and the consent underlying it continues; it is never, on this account, a property an individual person can simply possess or wield alone. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental, requires implements, weapons, and can be exercised by very few people, even a single person, against many, precisely because it does not depend on numbers or consent at all.

The consequential move follows: violence can destroy power, since a sufficiently armed minority can suppress or overthrow a government that has lost the consent, and therefore the power, that previously sustained it, but violence can never create power, because power depends on ongoing collective action and consent that guns alone cannot generate. A government that increasingly relies on violence to maintain itself is not, on this account, demonstrating strength; it is demonstrating the prior collapse of its actual power, the withdrawal of the consent that alone could have sustained it without recourse to force. Arendt develops this argument in explicit and pointed disagreement with formulations, associated particularly with Mao Zedong, that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, arguing this gets the relationship exactly backward.

Thoughts on Politics and Revolution. The closing piece, an interview conducted with the German journalist Adelbert Reif, in which Arendt reflects more informally on the student movements then reshaping university life, on revolutionary politics more broadly, and on her longstanding preference, developed at greater length in her earlier book On Revolution, for a council system of direct, localized political participation as an alternative to the modern mass party apparatus she regarded as having hollowed out genuine citizen engagement in most contemporary democracies.

How to read it

Read On Violence first, regardless of the volume’s printed order. It is the essay with the most durable and most widely applicable theoretical content, and understanding Arendt’s technical distinction between power and violence makes the other three essays, each of which assumes and deploys that distinction in different ways, considerably easier to follow.

Read Lying in Politics with the Pentagon Papers themselves, or at least a good historical account of them, close at hand if possible. Arendt’s essay is a close analysis of a specific, documented episode of governmental deception, and her argument lands with much greater force when you have some sense of the actual documentary record she is working from.

Notice how Arendt’s defense of civil disobedience differs from a purely individual, conscience-based justification. Her insistence on civil disobedience as organized, collective, public action, continuous with a broader American tradition of voluntary association, is a deliberately institutional argument, aimed at securing civil disobedience a recognized political status rather than resting its legitimacy on the private moral conviction of the individual disobedient alone.

Work through the power and violence distinction with a concrete historical or contemporary example in hand, testing whether Arendt’s framework actually illuminates the case or strains against it. Ask specifically whether a government or movement you know something about was, at a given moment, exercising genuine power in her technical sense, or substituting violence for power that had already been lost.

Read this collection as a document of a specific historical moment as much as a work of enduring political theory. Arendt is writing directly into the crises of 1969 to 1971, and knowing the specific events, the war, the Pentagon Papers, the campus protests, that provoked each essay sharpens rather than dates the arguments.

Questions it raises

• Is Arendt’s sharp distinction between power and violence a genuine conceptual clarification, or does it understate how often the two are practically intertwined, with violence used specifically to generate the conditions under which new power arrangements can then form?
• Does her defense of civil disobedience as organized collective action, rather than individual conscience, capture what actually motivates most acts of civil disobedience, or does it exclude cases that seem intuitively to belong to the same category?
• If sustained organized political deception eventually deceives the deceivers themselves, as Arendt argues happened with Vietnam policy, what does that suggest about the actual limits of propaganda and image management as tools of political control?
• Can a government maintain itself through violence alone for an extended period, or does Arendt’s argument that violence cannot generate power predict that such governments are inherently unstable regardless of their apparent strength?
• What would Arendt’s framework say about forms of coercion that fall short of physical violence, economic pressure, surveillance, disinformation, that do not fit neatly into either her category of power or her category of violence?
• Her preference for a council system over party democracy runs through several of her works. What would it actually take to implement genuine council-style direct participation at the scale of a modern nation state, and does she adequately address that practical question?