How violence became quintessential to the idea of the Modern State

A core idea in political philosophy since at least the 17th century, if not since antiquity, is that violence is quintessential to the definition of politics and to the State. The basic idea is that the State needs the threat of force in order to coerce people into maintaining order. People only behave well, the thought is, if they’re frightened of what will happen if they follow their impulses and, for example, murder someone they don’t like.

Hobbes gave three reasons why human beings, left to their own devices without the coercive apparatus of the State, would be in a condition of war. The first was that human beings are naturally competitive. They want the same things, whether that’s land or a wife or an everyday object, and therefore they would start to fight over these things. He then said that this fundamental dynamic of competition causes people to mistrust each other, to be frightened of each other, and so to lash out in pre-emptive, mistrustful strikes against each other. Finally, he said that there was a particular kind of human being who positively enjoys dominating other people and therefore fuels the kind of war that he thought is endemic to human nature.

That is why Hobbes said you need to set up a State, the Leviathan, which will be of such unambiguous, enormous power and threat and force that no one will dare to disobey the law and take another person’s property or kill another person’s wife. The only way in which you can ensure peace – that people behave well and stay in their own jurisdiction and don’t take what’s not theirs – is if you erect a totally terrifying Leviathan, a monster of the State that will make sure that everyone behaves.

Hobbes chose the metaphor of Leviathan from the Old Testament. In the Book of Job, the Leviathan is described as this extraordinary sea monster. If you try to come at it with swords of iron, the beast just sloughs away the swords as if they were made of straw. If you shoot arrows at the beast, they become merely stubble in his beard. So there’s this idea that the State has to be the most terrifying thing in order to make sure that people behave.

One philosopher in the 20th century who challenged this intimate definitional connection between violence and the State was German philosopher Hannah Arendt. She was a secular Jew who escaped the Gestapo, fled through Europe and found refuge in the United States. For her, politics was the opposite of violence. Violence wasn’t the securer or guarantor of politics; these two were opposing forces.

She’s writing under the threat of nuclear war and in the context of nuclear proliferation, in the heat of the Cold War. And she’s musing on this mad theory that mutually assured destruction will be the way in which we are assuredly going to remain safe and not destroy each other.

In relation to this, Arendt asked us to think about the nature of the political. For her, the space of the political was a space where dissent was possible. The political was the space of consent and dissent. It was a space of freedom. It had to be a space of freedom; otherwise, it was a space of tyranny, which is not politics. And violence doesn’t allow for dissent.

Violence may get things done, but it snuffs out the thing that is quintessential to politics, which is the capacity for dissent, deliberation, debate and freedom. And that’s why Arendt was very worried about the student movements born in 1968 and continuing into the 1970s, although she understood that they came from the greatest and most just of intentions. She was worried because she did not think that violence would beget anything but more violence. Violence doesn’t beget politics, as far as Arendt was concerned.

A further challenge to this idea that violence is essential to the definition and the working of the State comes from abolition theory, a theory developed by philosophers such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Their core thought is that you don’t solve the problem of violence with more violence.

There are various prongs to the theory. The first is that violence is not working; the criminal justice system is not keeping us safe. If you think about violence against women, it’s just not the case that women are kept safe by the criminal justice system, by prisons. The vast majority of rapes are not prosecuted. Indeed, the prosecutions for rape are falling in the UK. It’s the case that two women a week on average are murdered by their partner or their ex-partner in England. So, the first point is that it’s just not working. The State is not keeping you safe.

The second point is that not only does the State fail in its supposed salvific endeavour to keep you safe, but moreover it harms those people who are most in need of its protection, who are at the margins of power. If you look at who is incarcerated, it is disproportionately people of colour. It is people with mental illness. The majority of women in prison are themselves the victims of domestic violence. This is where the brutal irony of the violent politics of the State plays out.