Discussions about violence are perhaps more prominent than ever before, and we are constantly bombarded with depictions of violence in films, the news, books, and a variety of other cultural mediums. We are living in an era which is sometimes described as the bloodiest on record, sometimes as the most peaceful[1]. Lively and fierce debates centre around just how violent we are as a species, and who or what is responsible for our aggressive tendencies. Since we’ll never stop arguing about morality and politics, it is inevitable that the issue of violence will rear its head here as well. Despite the use of violent ideas by many theorists, such as an insistence on strong law and order[2], there is certainly a current of either implicit or explicit anti-violent thought running through political philosophy[3]. With this in mind, I would like to take a look at the question of whether it is even possible to properly separate political theorizing from violence, and also whether “non-violent” contemporary theories can really meet this standard.
It is helpful to provide some archetypal examples of both politics and violence to make the discussion clearer, although defining these terms is notoriously difficult. The term “politics” is obviously used in many ways, but it is fair to say that debates and actions are political in nature if they are centred around topics such as justice, power, oppression, how people should live together in society, and how power should rightfully be exercised – if at all. Any debates about the state – and what its responsibilities should be – can usually be classed as political in nature. Regarding violence, I imagine that most people would be willing to accept something as violent if it involves intentional physical harm to a person or property. War and homicide can serve as obvious examples. Whether or not violence can be structural or psychological is more contentious, and I will return to this later.
To try and answer the question about whether politics and violence are intimately linked, it may be helpful to turn to Carl Schmitt, who has become (in)famous for drawing a deep connection between the concept of politics and that of violent conflict. For Schmitt, the concept of politics is intrinsically tied to violence simply because of what politics essentially is. The basis of politics is enmity – the distinction between groups of people who confront each other as enemies. He writes that “…the specific political distinction … is that between friend and enemy.”[4] The friend/enemy distinction lies at the basis of all politics – political activity is unimaginable without it. Because of the friend/enemy theory of political activity, politics is inevitably tied to war, or at least the possibility of war. The friend/enemy distinction is public rather than private – political enemies are not personal enemies, although the two can overlap. For enemies in the public sphere, war is the final arbiter. On the international stage, groups who have disagreements can attempt to resolve these through diplomacy and through supranational organizations. However, if such attempts fail, the conflict can either remain unresolved, or it can be resolved through the use of warfare. In national affairs, the situation is similar; if discussion breaks down, and peaceful procedures fail to resolve the differences between friends and enemies, then, by necessity, civil war will be the final arbiter.
This Schmittian view does not mean that all politics must result in war. Instead, if there is no possibility of war, there is no politics, and the idea of politics makes sense only if there is an enemy to be contained, something that in principle is in need of violent suppression. It should be noted that Schmitt was a prominent Nazi, and his doctrine no doubt has an uncomfortably strong connection to National Socialism[5]. Although there is no logical connection between the theoretical idea of the friend/enemy distinction and far-right politics, it is true that Schmitt’s view, if read in a particular way, can fuel racist and authoritarian views.
Without denying this, there is undoubtedly something correct about the Schmittian view – and it casts some doubt on the way in which people try to put forward violence-free politics. It is true that people designate others as enemies precisely because they see them as potentially dangerous, and that the possibility of conflict always lurks in the background. One of the many reasons for this is that political debates are often connected to extremely important moral and controversial issues. And, naturally, if you think that someone is attempting to put into place unreasonable and oppressive policies that run contrary to what you think counts as basic moral acceptability, this at least raises the possibility of violence. In other words, you will at least implicitly see violence as a possible route that may be justified if it is necessary to constrain unreasonable people. It is only if you have an excessively “judicial” view of politics that you are likely to see political debates as occupying “safe” territory, in which people come together as friends and equals to work through the technical fine points of legal/political philosophy and evaluate the best public policies. In reality, different groups often confront each other to fight for the power to implement their vision of how people should live together, even if this is sometimes camouflaged by technocratic language. We only need to think of political issues of an explicitly moral nature such as abortion, racism, foreign policy, and the personal behaviour of certain American presidents.
This view is not always accepted by mainstream political theory, though. Although not a pacifist, John Rawls is a major theorist who sometimes implies (or maybe assumes) that violence and politics are not very closely related[6]. But even Rawls did effectively create a friend/enemy distinction in his works. It is true that Rawls does often seem to have a very technical view of politics, in which many major decisions about justice are made in a theoretical sphere rather than the real world, and there is a great reverence for judicial methods for resolving disputes[7]. However, Rawls, by labelling many people and movements as “unreasonable” implicitly sets up a friend/enemy distinction, which leads him to believe that some comprehensive doctrines should be “contained” by civilized society rather than engaged with[8]. People who hold such “unreasonable” views are obviously not outside politics, but are often deeply involved with politics at every level of society; moreover, it seems that, by Rawls’ own definition, many people (Trump supporters? Some Brexiteers?) hold “unreasonable” views, not simply a few lunatics. Almost no liberal theorists would argue that these people should be politically disenfranchised; liberals would just say that they cannot theoretically justify the liberal system, or liberal policies, in a way that unreasonable people could reconcile with their world-view[9]. Nevertheless, unreasonable people do seem to constitute a threat or enemy of some kind, and there must be a process for preventing them from gaining too much power. Indeed, many liberals would be happy to say that the coercive apparatus of the state can legitimately be used to stop unreasonable people spreading their irrationality or hatred[10].
I would still argue, then, that the concept of “reasonableness” does create the (theoretical) possibility of political violence. The Schmittian view, then, certainly does contain some truth. However, I think that the connection between violence and politics in modern theories is often different from the way in which Schmitt portrays it. Whilst the possibility of war and direct physical violence is very real, it is more common to find politics tied to other kinds of violence, especially that of a psychological or indirect nature. This is not simply an empirical point, since I think it reflects something about the nature of modern political theories themselves.
If we take the designation of certain ideologies as “unreasonable” or “beyond the pale” we can begin to see that politics may be violent in a psychological sense. If there is a widely shared liberal “sense of justice”[11] and certain viewpoints are considered to be simply unacceptable, then this is bound to have serious consequences for the general prospects of those who hold such views. It is not that liberals advocate physical violence against offending parties – although, as we have seen, this usually remains a background possibility – but instead that they implicitly support societal disapproval and stigmatization.
To give an example of this, imagine someone who holds illiberal views about, say, freedom of religion or women’s rights. In a society where people have a liberal sense of justice, and generally regard this person as unreasonable, will it be possible for them to live a normal, flourishing life, or will their prospects inevitably be damaged by the way other people see them? It seems very difficult to imagine that negative perceptions of them will not make any difference; it is well-established that a failure to conform to societal standards is something that can make life more difficult[12]. If we consider the problems that may be faced by those with offensive views in a world where people generally accept liberal justice – for example, finding certain kinds of employment – it seems obvious that there can be a form of psychological pressure inherent in even moderate political theories. This kind of psychological pressure can, I think, count as violent in nature if it is systematic, and it damages the prospects for a flourishing life for offending parties.
I am not primarily attempting to make the claim that this kind of political violence is especially prevalent in modern states (although this is a possibility), but instead that it is tacitly endorsed by modern political theories, even those that appear on the surface to be largely opposed to the use of violence for political ends. In fact, it is hard to think of political theories that do not have this tendency. Proponents of all political ideologies want their ideas to become more widely believed, and are naturally disposed to see people who stray a long way from their views as being in some sense a problem to be contained. It is not, of course, always the case that people do face stigmatization for their views – much of the time they do not in their day-to-day lives. However, this could partly be because many people do not care about politics (or such ideas as justice) very much[13]; it could also result from the fact that there are so many competing views in many modern Western societies that there are not many clear “minorities” to target. There is also the fact that some people may choose to stay within familiar circles and not share their views with others, whenever this is possible at least. This, however, does not mean that political theories do not have the intention to create a society in which people with unacceptable views are stigmatized.
Of course, it will be objected that this kind of political stigma may well be justified on the grounds that some views are genuinely repellent, and people who hold them deserve to be punished in some way. This is perhaps true – I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not arguing that this kind of psychological violence is unjustified, but that it is an important part of the structure of at least many contemporary political theories. It is interesting to debate whether or not political theories should be changed so as to lessen (or even eliminate) this support for psychological coercion, but this is a separate question.
A more serious objection would be to deny that what I have described genuinely counts as a form of violence. While the concept of war clearly counts as violent[14], it is not obvious that stigmatization and psychological effects should be labelled “violent”. It may be objected that using the term in this way turns violence into a rather empty concept that can simply be deployed at will.
The problem here is that “violence” is very difficult to define, and people’s intuitions on the topic often clash. It is particularly challenging to find definitions that are broad enough to avoid being open to the charge of excessive reductionism, while narrow enough to avoid being trivial. In response to this, I would argue that the concept of violence must be defined to include more than simply acts of physical force that are intended to kill or damage somebody or something (which is perhaps what you would call the dictionary definition of “violence”). If we define it like this, or in some other narrow way, it leads to conceptual difficulties. Psychological abuse, for instance, ought to count as violence, otherwise we would commit ourselves to the view that a domestic relationship in which one partner subjects the other to cruel and systematic psychological abuse is not a violent one, whereas a relationship in which one partner physically abuses the other occasionally would be. Even though the harm caused in the former case is far greater, only the latter would count as violent under the dictionary definition. This is unacceptable because, first of all, it does not properly take into consideration the effects on victims, and it therefore fails to capture what is truly important about the word “violence”. It also seems somewhat arbitrary; even sexual violence could possibly be excluded from the dictionary definition if such violence is considered to not be aimed at damaging or destroying somebody or something. Obviously, these cases are very different from political stigma, but they do show that a broader definition of violence is necessary.
I can see no reason for refusing to extend the concept of violence to psychological struggles or political stigmatization. There is little risk, I think, of making the concept of violence too broad by taking this position. The problem that needs to be avoided is stumbling into the situation where violence is defined so broadly that almost any action can potentially count as a violent one. And I don’t think this is a real danger just because of what I have said. Therefore, the psychological aspect of political stigmatization adds another dimension to the connection between politics and violence. Although most modern political theories are not anti-violent in the sense that they are pacifistic, many theorists do imply that violence should only be used in very limited (perhaps desperate) circumstances. The idea that many theorists unknowingly advocate (possibly extensive) psychological pressure casts doubt on this if, as I have argued, psychological pressure genuinely counts as a form of violence.
What does this all mean for real-world politics? Perhaps the main point to take away is that, in the modern world, and in contemporary political theories, violence is always in the background. It does not matter how committed you are to being peaceful – your world-view will in all probability make room for the possibility of violence. If I were to give a very crude cultural analysis, I would suggest that, in recent years, there has been an increase in the intensity of the friend/enemy distinction in Western states. In America, it seems as though Trump’s supporters and detractors often do not simply disagree, but sometimes even refuse to see one another as civilized persons. Similar trends can be observed in the UK, where the supporters and opponents of Brexit have argued in intense and polarizing terms. It is very hard to dispute the idea that various forms of (sometimes justified?) stigmatization exist on both sides.
I think these developments are in some sense positive. They indicate that an overly technocratic view of politics is inaccurate – it is in fact dishonest to try to portray politics as being free from often bitter struggles between those with different priorities and values. While it is not necessarily true that violence and politics have become more intertwined in recent years, these developments have shown that political theorists of all persuasions must think carefully about what it really means when they say they are anti-violent.
Footnotes
[1] See Charles Tilly, “Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual”, from Boston Review, 2002, accessed on 12/04/2020 at https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR27.3/tilly.html#2. For the opposing view, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, New York, Penguin Books, 2011. [2] Thomas Hobbes is still probably the best example: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, Penguin Books, 1985 (first published 1651). [3] For one important example see Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York, Harcourt, 1970. [4] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, London, The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p.26 (my italics). [5] See, e.g., Richard Bessel, Nazism and War, London, Phoenix Books, 2005. [6] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971, Part 2, Ch.6. [7] See John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”, from Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 505-510. See also Jerome C. Foss, “John Rawls and the Supreme Court: A Study in Continuity and Change”, Ph.D. Thesis, Baylor University, 2011 [8] Ibid., pp.488-489. [9] See Jonathan Quong, “The Rights of Unreasonable Citizens”, from the Journal of Political Philosophy Vol.12, No.3, pp.314–335. [10] See Matej Cibik and Pavol Hardos, “Conspiracy Theories and Reasonable Pluralism”, from the European Journal of Political Theory, accessed on 12/04/2020 at https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885119899232. [11] Rawls, TJ, Part 3, Ch.8. [12] See Brenda Major et. al., “Stigma and Its Implications for Health: Introduction and Overview”, from Brenda Major, John F. Dovidio, and Bruce G. Link (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Stigma, Discrimination, and Health, New York : Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 3-26. [13] Low voter turnout may provide some evidence for this. See Simon Oxenham, “The Rise of Political Apathy in two Charts”, from Nature, 06 June 2017, https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2502/news/the-rise-of-political-apathy-in-two-charts-1.22106, Accessed on 12/04/2020 [14] See Emily Schindeler and Danielle M.Reynald, “What is the evidence? Preventing Psychological Violence in the Workplace”, from Aggression and Violent Behaviour, Vol.36, Sep.2017, pp.25-33. See also Claudiane Melançon and Marie-Hélène Gagné, “Father’s and Mother’s Psychological Violence and Adolescent Behavioral Adjustment”, from The Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Vol.26, No.5, pp.991–1011.