1

Political Violence

James Mensch, St. Francis Xavier University,

When one regards the conflicts of the past century, Hegel’s description of history

as a “slaughter-bench” seems apt.1 The two world wars the century witnessed were ex-

traordinarily violent. In the First, the combatants were subject to an industrial scale

slaughter by being systematically exposed to machine gun fire, artillery bombardments

and poison gas. The Second World War added to these horrors with its concept of “total

war,” which was defined as a war directed against the totality of the enemy nation: its

schools, factories, cities, in short, the entirety of its civilian population. In pursuit of this

policy, cities were firebombed, populations were deported or systematically starved, and

non-combatants generally were subject to much the same violence as armies in the field.

This extension of violence to civilian populations continued in the conflicts that followed.

It was particularly marked in the liberation struggles and the civil wars that have ex-

tended from the post-war period to this day. While violence between nations has not

been lacking, the organized intra-state violence of civil wars and the violence of “failed”

states have come to the fore. Again and again, we witness outrages against defenseless

populations, their robbing and murder by marauding bands. Such violence seems a con-

tinuation of the violence that arises whenever the withdrawal of the forces of civil order

occurs. Whether this is occasioned by a natural disaster or by the fall of a dictatorship,

looting and gang violence with its settling of scores seems inevitably to errupt. As the

example of countries from Somalia to Iraq has shown, such violence only ceases when

met by the counter-violence of the forces of public order.

In noting these facts, I do not mean to suggest that the past century or our own are

unique in being marked by violence. So prevalent is violence in human history that a

good part of the political and diplomatic efforts of mankind can be understood in terms of

our attempts to deal with violence. Viewed in this light, the ultimate issue may well be

how one prevents political differences from becoming violent. What makes such a ques-

tion so difficult for the West is our tradition of equating freedom with sovereignty.

Sovereignty is the prerogative to rule. It expresses, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the ideal

of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership.”2 From this a fateful syllogism

arises: “If we wish to be free, we must be sovereign. Given our dependence on others,

the self-sufficiency required for sovereignty implies being master over them. We thus

face the choice between ruling and being ruled. To rule, we must engage in violence, we

must deprive others of their ability to rule us.” This argument implies that freedom and

violence are conjoined. It indicates that the thrust towards freedom is itself an impetus

towards violence. If we grant this, then we cannot say that the ideal of political life is the

maximum consonant (or harmonious) expression of the freedom of each of the citizens.3

Rather, the conjunction of violence and freedom implies that politics consists not so

much in expressing, as containing freedom. Is this a correct conclusion?

The fact that limiting freedom does not always contain violence should make us

pause. In fact, our failures with regard to containing political violence indicate how im-

perfectly we understand its nature. In what follows, I am going to argue that the West’s

equation of freedom and sovereignty is, in fact, a conflation, one based on a deeper con-

fusion of two very different attitudes we can have towards our others. My claim will be
 3

that it is only by untangling them that we can gain a practical understanding of the nature

of political violence.

In considering the difficulties of our attempts to contain political violence, I am

going to abstract from the question of international violence. This can be done by accept-

ing the argument that such violence is the result of a lack of an international political or-

der, one with the power to enforce its decrees on individual states. To the point that such

an order becomes effectively binding, individual states, at least with regard to the ques-

tion of violence, can be considered to be federated into a single state, one with an en-

forceable constitution. This abstraction allows us to go directly to the classic response to

the question of how to avoid intra-state violence. Such violence, it is asserted, can be

prevented through a binding constitution. The constitution sets, as it were, the rules of

the game for managing conflicts of interest. In doing so, it places limits on the ability of

factions to promote their own interests. Thus, in a democratic constitution, conflicts of

1
Hegel describes “history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of
peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized”
(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree
[New York: Dover Publications, 1956], p. 21.

2
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press 1958), p. 234.

3
This is Kant’s ideal. He writes: “A constitution of the greatest possible hu-
man freedom according to laws, by which the liberty of every individual can con-
sist with the liberty of every other … is … a necessary idea, which must be
placed at the foundation not only of the first plan of the constitution of a state, but
of all its laws” (Critique of Pure Reason, B373).
 4

interests, to the point that they involve the law, become conflicts over the interests that

should be represented in writing the law. As such, they can be settled by elections. The

same holds for conflicts regarding who should execute the laws. The president in the

American system is chosen by vote. Parliamentary systems, have their own varied ways

of choosing the prime minister. The same holds for conflicts involving who should inter-

pret the laws. The constitution, in setting up the judiciary, regulates this as well.

The difficulties with this response are well known. The electoral system can be-

come undermined by changing the boundaries of electoral districts or by the purposeful

exclusion of classes of voters. The judiciary can become politicized through the partisan

choice of judges as representing particular political philosophies or economic or racial in-

terests. Such politization can include the judges called on to interpret the constitution.

Here, the constitution itself, rather than regulating political conflict, becomes an object of

competing, irreconcilable interests. At end of this process, the constitution can lose its

binding authority. In the absence of such authority, there is nothing to prevent either the

executive or the legislative authorities from ignoring the “rules of the game” it represents.

The communitarian response to such a prospect relies on the creation of social

solidarity. It holds that the ultimate bulwark against factionalism rending the constitution

is a certain social cohesion or consensus—one that translates into a sense of respect for

the law and with this into a respect for the constitution itself. Charles Taylor, for exam-

ple, warns that “democratic society will collapse” without such “foundations” as “consen-

sus,” “solidarity,” and “cohesion.”4 You need these foundations to insure not just that

people will “pay their taxes without being hounded, but also people will become soldiers

4
“A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” Symposium 9:1 (2005), 124.
 5

and go to war, people will participate in its decisions and vote.” What is needed is some

kind of “identification with the whole.” He also states: “That is where communitarianism

comes in for me … many liberal theories completely ignore the conditions of this kind of

creation without which you don’t have a liberal society, you don’t have a democratic so-

ciety.”5 Taylor’s point is that the state insures its foundation by the “reinforcement of

common values” through programs designed to promote these. The difficulty with this

solution can be drawn from the very context of Taylor’s remarks, which is that of his

home province, Quebec. Many Quebecois did not feel sufficient solidarity with the rest

of Canada to accept the draft during the Second World War. The programs subsequently

instituted to insure common values deepened the solidarity among the French, but not

with the ethnic groups forming the rest of the country. In the last referendum on indepen-

dence, which followed the failure of constitutional talks, the break-up of Canada was

averted by the narrowest of margins. At present, the constitution continues to be the chief

point of conflict between the Quebec nationalists and those who oppose them. The diffi-

culty, then, of relying on the creation of common values is that commonality can all to of-

ten reduce itself to the solidarities of race, language, or class and their associated values.

When it does, such commonality ignores the alterity that is essential to modern, pluralis-

tic states.

The Canadian example can furnish us with another means for holding a nation to-

gether. This is the use of state power. In response to the activities of the Quebec Libera-

tion Front in 1971, the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, invoked the War Powers

Act, suspending civil liberties. Although the Act was of short duration, it did forcibly ex-

5
Ibid., 121.
 6

hibit, through the presence of police and soldiers, the state’s legal monopoly of the means

of violence. In other countries, such “states of emergency” can be frequent and long last-

ing. At the end of this prospect is the permanent suspension, not just of civil liberties, but

of the constitution itself. The state becomes transformed into an opponent of political life

as this is normally understood. Politics itself, with the loss of the constitution that regu-

lates the rules of its game, comes to an end and is replaced by a tyranny.

II

It is precisely against such a prospect that most constitutions contain provisions

limiting state powers, provisions that declare, in the words of the American Bill of

Rights, that “Congress shall pass no law that ….” The difficulties with such safeguards

are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level, the constitution by itself is a mere

piece of paper. It has no enforcing powers. Powers of enforcement belong to the state,

the very state that can, in declaring a state of emergency, suspend the constitution. On

the theoretical level, the difficulty can be put in terms of the position that nations with

their constitutions are the result of a founding violence. Once called into existence, they

maintain themselves through a sustaining violence.

Thomas Hobbes’ argument for this is instructive. He traces the origin of violence

among men to their natural equality. He writes: “Nature hath made men so equall in the

faculties of body, and mind … [that] the difference between man and man is not so con-

siderable as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another

may not pretend as well as he” (Leviathan, p. 94).6 Given this equality, they all feel that

they have the same hope of acquiring these benefits. Competition arises and, with this,

6
Hobbes’s Leviathan : Reprinted from the Edition of 1651 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1962). All references in the body of the text will be to this work.
 7

enmity. In Hobbes’ words: “And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which

nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies,” the result being that men

“endeavour to destroy or subdue one another” (ibid, p. 95). Each, in fact, so fears the

others that he attempts to subdue them in advance. With this, we have the natural condi-

tion of man “which is called Warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every

man” (ibid., p. 96). According to Hobbes, the only way to get out of this condition,

where the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” is through each person

laying down his rights to use all means to defend himself. This is done by his transfer-

ring them to the state. To found a state, in other words, involves the state’s monopolizing

the violence that each of us formally employed to defend himself (ibid., p. 131). The

founding thus occurs when the sovereign “hath the use of so much Power and Strength

conferred on him that by [the] terror thereof he is inabled to forme the wills of them all to

Peace at home and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad” (ibid., p. 132).

Two things are striking in this account. The first is that it follows the paradigm

that equates freedom and sovereignty, sovereignty being taken as self-sufficiency and

mastery. To be free, one must be master. Thus, anticipating that others will try to gain

the same goods that he desires, each person, with an eye to his self-sufficiency, attempts

to overcome them. In Hobbes’ words, he endeavors “by force or wiles to master the per-

sons of all men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him.”7

When states are founded, the paradigm continues with their attempting to master one an-

7
“And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure
himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the
persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to en-
danger him” (Leviathan, p. 95)
 8

other, that is, in their being in an open or concealed state of war. In both cases, the

process is fueled by a competition for “benefits.” It also rests on the presumed equality

of the combatants. This is the second striking element. It is the fact that we cannot see a

sufficient difference between us to justify our giving someone else an advantage over us.

Hobbes brings the point home by comparing men with other social species such as bees.

Bees have no competition for honor and glory. All distinctions between them are natural.

They are, thus, distinguished from men by the fact that “the agreement of these creatures

is Naturall; that of men is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall.” Thus, nature regulates

the actions of the bees towards their common good. Men, however, have no such con-

straints. Their artificial covenant thus requires “a Common Power to keep them in awe

and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit” (Leviathan, p. 131). This stress on

our lack of natural distinctions points to a certain abstractness in Hobbes’ consideration

of our “natural state.” Family, friends, tribal loyalties are all left out of account. Each in-

dividual is like the others since each is abstracted from the social context—the circum-

stances of family, history and fortune—that might differentiate him. In the state of na-

ture, our life, according to Hobbes, is “solitary.” The question that we will have to con-

sider is whether this atomistic view of human nature is presupposed in the equation of

freedom with mastery. If it is, we will have to work out more clearly its role in the vio-

lence this equation entails. At issue will be whether our failures to understand and,

hence, contain violence can be traced to this atomistic view of human nature.

III

According to Hobbes, we should not think the state of nature as a condition that

entirely disappears with the founding of the state. Its persistence, he notes, is attested to
 9

by the fact that men go armed when they go on a journey, that they lock their houses

when they depart and, in fact, keep certain chests locked even when they are at home

(Leviathan, p. 99). In such cases, they acknowledge that in the absence of state power

(for example, in the isolated areas one passes on a journey), a natural condition of war

continues to persist. According to the theorist Agamben, this persistence is actually an

internal principle of the state. In his words, “Hobbes … was perfectly aware … that the

state of nature did not necessarily have to be conceived as a real epoch, but rather could

be understood as a principle internal to the State revealed in the moment in which the

State is considered ‘as if it were dissolved.’”8 Such dissolution occurs not just when a

natural disaster, such as a hurricane, disables the forces of public order with the resulting

rioting and looting. It appears when the sovereign declares a ”state of exception” or

“emergency” suspending civil rights. During this time, the sovereign can kill, imprison,

or generally molest the citizens of the state with impunity. The crimes that the sovereign

forbids his subjects, he allows himself. What shows itself in such a state of emergency is,

according to Agamben, the violence that first established the state. Thus, the state of

“sovereign” exception is instituted not as some law, but in order to establish the situation

in which law is possible.9

The point Agamben is making can be put in terms of Walter Benjamin’s distinc-

tion between the violence that founds and that which preserves the state. According to

Benjamin, “all violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving.”10 The vio-

lence that preserves the law is present in the means that the police use to enforce the law.

In enforcing it, they preserve the state. The violence that makes the law, by contrast,

founds the state. Thus, in the conflicts that give rise to the state, the terms of the victori-
 10

ous party become the founding law. In Benjamin’s words, “the moment of instatement

does not dismiss violence; rather at the very moment of law-making, it specifically estab-

lishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound

to it, under the title of power. Law-making is power making, assumption of power, and

to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence.”11 This violence shows itself in the

use of police powers to enforce the laws. It appears in its original form “when the state

… can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at

any price to attain.” At this point, the police “intervene ‘for security reasons’ in countless

cases where no clear legal situation exists.”12 The action of the police in such cases, is

“law making” because its “function” is “the assertion of legal claims for any decree.”13

What is at issue here is the legal space itself, which is that of public order. As both Ben-

jamin and Agamben note, the role of the police is fraught with ambiguity. It is law-pre-

serving, since its ends are given by the laws of the state, and its use of power “is subject

to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends.” Yet as the representative of the

founding violence, police power represents something prior to the law. Thus, “unlike

law, which acknowledges in the ‘decision’ determined by place and time … a claim to

8
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 36.

9
In Agamben’s words, “What is at issue in the sovereign exception is not so
much the control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and definition of
the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity.” This
means that “in its archetypal form, the state of exception is therefore the principle
of every juridical localization, since only the state of exception opens the space in
which the determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first
becomes possible” (Homo Sacer, p. 19).
 11

critical evaluation” by legal scholars, “a consideration of the police institution encounters

nothing essential at all. Its power is formless.”14

The paradox here is that the sovereign authority manifested by the police is both

inside and outside the state. Thus, insofar as the police exercise a law-making function,

they express this authority as prior to the state, that is, as prior to its laws. When a state

of emergency is declared and civil rights are suspended, the only thing at issue is the

restoration of public order. In Agamben’s words, “What is at issue in the sovereign ex-

ception is not so much the control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and defi-

nition of the very space in which the juridico-political order can have validity.” This

means that “in its archetypal form, the state of exception is therefore the principle of ev-

ery juridical localization, since only the state of exception opens the space in which the

determination of a certain juridical order and a particular territory first becomes possi-

ble.”15 Here, there is no question of law, but of the establishment of law, that is, of the

public space in which law can appear. Hobbes puts this point by noting that in the state

of nature, there is no law. In such a state, “nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right

and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place.” The reason for this is clear:

“Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice”

(Leviathan, p. 98). Given that the sovereign represents this common power, he grounds

the law. But as such, he is outside of it. Thus, as Hobbes states, “there can happen no

breach of Covenant on the part of the Sovereign” (ibid, p. 134). What he represents

within the state is the natural violence that is prior to the state. In Agamben’s words, “in

10
“Critique of Violence” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-
1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press), p. 243.
 12

Hobbes the state of nature survives in the person of the sovereign who is the only one to

preserve its ius contra omnes. Sovereignty thus presents itself as the incorporation of the

state of nature in society.”16 The police manifest this incorporation. They are both law-

making and law-preserving.17 They represent both the constituting power of founding vi-

olence and the constituted power of an established legal system. The ambiguity of their

function is that of the power of the sovereign. In Agamben’s words, “the sovereign

power divides itself into constituting power and constituted power and maintains itself in

relation to both, positioning itself at the point of intersection.”18

If this is an accurate description, then we cannot look to a constitutional solution

to the question of intra-state violence. If Hobbes, Benjamin and Agamben are correct, vi-

olence both founds and preserves the state. The state functions by internalizing the vio-

lence of nature. This implies that it has no inherent limits. In particular, it implies that its

“constituting power neither derives from the constituted order nor limits itself to institut-

ing it.”19 What we face here is a fundamental ambiguity. Existing at the point of inter-

section between the constituting violence and the constituted legal order, the state permits

itself what it forbids its citizens. In Agamben’s words, “The sovereign sphere is the

sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide.”20 In a certain, pre-

cise sense, it grounds the legal order by violating it, that is, by excepting itself from the

order’s precepts. We cannot, then, appeal to it to banish the specter of intra-state vio-

11
Ibid., p. 248.

12
Ibid., p. 243.

13
Ibid.

14
Ibid.
 13

lence. Inherent within the sovereign sphere is the exception to whatever order we try to

impose through it. It itself contains the exception that can be used by political parties,

factions and other groups to break through the order it imposes.

IV

According to the above, violence originates in a competition between solitary

selves. In the war of “every man against every man,” every man is an “enemy to every

man” (Leviathan, pp. 96-7). For Hobbes, the causes of this original war are our natural

equality—the fact that nature made us essentially similar in mind and body—and a com-

petition for benefits. Given our natural equality, we cannot see why others should enjoy

some benefit and we should not. There is, in other words, a natural egotism in which

each of us asks, “why should you have this and I not?” For Hobbes, “without a common

Power to keep [us] all in awe” and enforce a series of conventional decisions regarding

ownership, there is no answer to this question (ibid., p. 96).

To see the limitations of this tradition, we need to consider its alternative. It is, in

its own way, as extreme as the tradition stemming from Hobbes. While in Hobbes’ atom-

istic view, man’s natural state is solitary and ruled by egotism, Aristotle sees the isolated

15
Homo Sacer, p. 19.

16
Homo Sacer, p. 35.

17
“Critique of Violence,” p. 243.

18
Homo Sacer, p. 41.

19
Ibid., p. 43.

20
“Critique of Violence,” p. 88.
 14

individual as an empty abstraction. As he observes, humans are never alone. Given our

finitude and neediness, starting from our very conception there never was a point when

we were not with others He writes, “in the first place, there must be a unity of those who

cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female” (“Politics,” 1252a 27; p.

1127).21 Beyond this, there is the resulting family of children, cousins, uncles, etc., the

grouping of families into villages, and the coalescence of villages into the state. In Aris-

totle’s words, “When several villages are united in a single complete community, large

enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in

the bare needs of life and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life” (1252b 27-

29; p. 1129). For Aristotle, then, the formation of the state is driven by “bare needs of

life.” It continues its development until these needs are met, that is, until the collection of

men is “large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing.” This self-sufficient state is the

“final cause” or inherent goal of the growth of the human community. Just as a plant ex-

hibits its nature when it reaches maturity, so the human community reveals its nature at

the point of its self-sufficiency.

For Aristotle, to call something “natural” means that it has an inborn goal to its

growth, one that directs it to a certain completion.22 Thus, all the stages of the plant’s de-

21
“Politics,” trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon (New York: Random House Press, 1941). All page references
to the “Politics,” will be to this translation.

22
In Aristotle’s words, “‘nature’ as genesis is a process towards [the prod-
uct’s] ‘nature.’ … what grows out of something proceeds to something or
‘grows,’ not towards that from which it starts, but that towards which it tends.
Hence, its final shape is its ‘nature’” (Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Richard Hope
[Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961], 193b 14-18, p. 25).
 15

velopment—from the seed to the sapling and thence to the seed-producing individual—

are “natural” since all follow a plan of growth—one that leads to realizing an inborn goal.

Aristotle’s claim is that the same holds for the state. In his words: “And therefore, if the

earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it is the end of them, and the nature

of a thing is its end” (“Politics,” 1252b 30; p. 1129). This identification of nature with

the end implies that it is only at the end of a natural process that we can grasp the essence

—the “what-it-was-to-be”—of the living individual.23 The “nature” that is exhibited in

the end stage makes sense of the various stages of the organism’s growth. These stages

reach their natural culmination when the organism is self-sufficient, that is, becomes ca-

pable of functioning on its own in such a way that it can (for example, through flowering

and bearing seeds) continue the species. Thus, Aristotle continues, “For what each thing

is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or

a family. Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is

the end and the best” (“Politics,” 1252b 31-1253a 1; p. 1129).

The assertion that “the state is a creation of nature” sets the context for the claim

that “man is a political animal.” The claim signifies that he can reach his natural, self-

sufficient end only within the state. Thus, for Aristotle, “the state is by nature clearly

prior to the family and to the individual.” This signifies that just as a part of a body can-

not survive apart from the body, so the “individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing”

(“Politics,” 1253a 27; p. 1130). This insufficiency is not just economic. It is not simply

a function of the fact that since no person can be a “jack of all trades,” human survival

depends upon a division of labor and, hence, on the resulting exchange of goods and ser-

23
“What is was to be” (to ti hen einai) translates literally the Aristotelian
term usually translated as essence.
 16

vices. It has to do with the very sense of what it means to be human. This sense, for

Aristotle, is unthinkable apart from the state. Thus, a person who is unable to live in so-

ciety or has no need of it is, he writes, either “a beast or a god” (ibid., 1253a 29; p. 1130).

He is either below or above humanity, but is not human. In fact, a single individual “may

be compared to an isolated piece at draughts” (ibid., 1253 a 5; p. 1129). Apart from the

board and the other pieces, the piece has no sense. The same holds for the human being.

Separated from the state, he is separated from “law and justice.” He becomes “the most

unholy and the most savage of the animals.” His very nature degenerates into “armed in-

justice” (ibid., 1235a 32-33; p. 1130).

Such descriptions remind us of Hobbes’s account of man in the “state of nature.”

There are, in fact, two very different senses of “nature” at work here. For Hobbes, “na-

ture” designates the primitive condition of man before the founding of society. The con-

dition is one of violence and is expressed in the “war of every man against every man.”

For Aristotle, nature expresses the end of the process that results in society. Man realizes

his nature through his social relations. The violence of man apart from society is not an

expression of his primitive condition, but rather of his political (or social) nature. What it

designates is his inability to morally function on his own. In this view, violence is not

“founding” with regard to the state. What is founding is the drive towards moral and eco-

nomic self-sufficiency. The very impulse that leads to the founding of the state leads as

well to “law and justice.”

How can we decide between these two very different views of our nature? Which

can better account for the fact of violence? For both, violence characterizes our nature
 17

outside of society. Both see the breakdown of the social order as leading to violence. At

issue, however, is the violence that occurs within the social sphere—in particular, the vio-

lence that leads to the breakdown of the political order. Aristotle suggests that our rela-

tions to others are primarily co-operative. The insufficiencies of our individual natures

are such that we have to cooperate to survive. For Hobbes, however, our relations to oth-

ers are primarily competitive. Given our natural equality, we necessarily want what oth-

ers do and compete with them for it. Without a sovereign power to keep us in “awe,” this

competition must lead to the breakdown of the state. Which is correct? We cannot adju-

dicate their claims without understanding more clearly the competitive and cooperative

relations we have to each other. At the basis of all such relations is our recognition of

others. When does this recognition lead to violence? Is it only the recognition underly-

ing the competitive relation that has the possibility of violence? Or does the recognition

required for cooperation also conceal this possibility? To pursue these questions, I shall

make use of the phenomenological account of recognition.

As Edmund Husserl pointed out, the basic structure of human recognition can be

described in terms of an analogy that we are continually making and adjusting in our rela-

tions with others. This analogy has four terms. Three of them are directly experienced,

the fourth term (much like a “fourth proportional” in mathematics) is filled in or “solved”

in terms of the three. Two of the experiential terms are the appearing of myself and my

other. I directly observe my own behavior and speech. I also observe the other’s bodily

behavior; I engage in conversation with him. The third term is my consciousness of my

inner life. I experience immediately the intentions and interpretations that explain to me
 18

what I do and say. I cannot, of course, similarly observe the other. This fourth term,

which consists of his conscious life, must be filled in by me.

There are two ways to conceive this filling it. I can say that if the other behaves

as I would in a similar situation, then I recognize him as person who controls his behavior

as I would. I acknowledge him as making sense of his situation in the same way that I

would were I in his place and, thus, recognize him as a subject like myself. This recogni-

tion is a result of my filling in the fourth term of the proportion: my appearing bodily be-

havior is to his as my consciousness is to his consciousness. Thus, I recognize the other

as a person like myself by “solving” for the fourth proportional, that is, by transferring to

him my sense of myself consciously controlling my behavior through my interpretation

of a given situation. As Husserl points out, this transfer is verifiable insofar as it is based

on the observed similarity of our behavior. Thus, to the point that the other does not be-

have as I would, I do not recognize him as a subject. My behavior, in other words, func-

tions as the standard for verification. In Husserl's words, “The experienced animate or-

ganism of the Other continues to manifest itself as actually an animate organism solely

through its continually harmonious behavior.... The organism is experienced as a pseudo-

organism precisely when it does not agree in its behavior.”24 “Harmonious,” here, means

harmonious with my own behavior. The Other's actions must “agree” with this in order

to establish the similarity necessary for the transfer. As Husserl expresses this, the

Other's ego is “determined as thus governing his body (and, in a familiar way, constantly

confirms this) only insofar as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes that are
 19

primordially perceivable by me must correspond to what is known in type from my own

governing of my body.”25

Such a view is obviously egotistical. It reduces the other to an expression of my-

self. If we follow it strictly, a person who behaved differently than I would could not

provide me with the evidence required to make the transfer. Lacking this, I could not rec-

ognize the person as a subject. In other words, were I to recognize others only to the

point that their behavior matched my own, any recognition I had of others would actually

only be a self-recognition. To avoid this, we have to move beyond Husserl’s description

and say that the other’s behavior must also function as a standard. This means that in my

encounter with the other, I do not just assume that he will behave as I would in his situa-

tion, thereby taking myself as a standard. I also assume that were I in his situation, I

could well act as he does. In other words, I take his behavior as a standard for verifying

my selfhood. In doing so, I imaginatively put myself in his situation in order to regard

the world in terms of his categories, his interpretations of a given situation. In this view

of the filling in of the fourth proportional, the transfer between us goes both ways. I rec-

ognize the other as a person, in transferring to him my sense of being a consciousness

grasping the situation. But I also transfer to myself his different grasp of this situation.

24
Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, The Hague: Martinus Ni-
jhoff, Hua I, 144.

25
Ibid., p. 148. This is also the case with the “higher psychical occur-
rences.” They have “their style of synthetic connections and their form of occur-
ring which can be understandable to me through their associative basis in my own
style of life, a style empirically familiar to me in its average typicality” (ibid., p.
149).
 20

Here, his behavior shows me that he understands it differently. This understanding is

made explicit in our discourse. Listening to and observing him, I do not simply interpret

what he says and does in terms of my own categories and interpretative intentions.

Rather, I suspend these to open myself up to his ways of making sense. Interpreting my-

self in their terms, I place my own categories in question. This includes a questioning of

the intentions that I direct to the other. In a certain sense, to grasp the other as other, I

have to take such intentions as inadequate. The other, I must assume, will exceed these.

He will not exactly match my intentions—i.e., my transfer to him of my ways of making

sense of the world. Recognizing him as other assumes that he will add something new to

them.

If the above is correct, then our recognition of others contains the basis for both

competition and cooperation. The type of relation depends on the direction of the trans-

fer. To the point that I take myself as a standard, recognition results in competition. Co-

operation, by contrast, requires my taking the other as a standard—that is, my opening

myself to his interpretations. To see this, let us first consider the aspect of recognition

that leads to competition. Taking myself as the standard, I recognize others as subjects

only to the point that they behave as I do. To the point that my others do so, I regard

them as desiring and seeking the same things as I do and hence as competing with me for

these. The result is the sense of “natural equality” where, as Hobbes writes, no one can

“claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he”

(Leviathan, p. 94). This, for Hobbes, leads to the violence of the competitive struggle.

Such violence, in other words, is a function of our “natural equality,” which itself is a

function of our recognizing subjects only to the point that they are similar to ourselves.
 21

Such recognition also implies that we cannot find any basis among subjects for the dis-

tinctions that social organization requires. These distinctions must accordingly be set by

the competitive struggle, that is, by the resulting relations of power. Once they are set,

the second aspect of this account of recognition comes to the fore. This is that I do not

recognize as subjects the others who do not behave as I do. Thus, once I reduce others to

an inferior status, the way is open for me to exploit them. In the extreme case, as with

“subject populations,” the way is open to treat them as mere things, that is, to act without

any moral restraint at all. The resulting violence can, in such cases, run the gamut from

the various forms of racial and economic exploitation to the various genocides that

marked human history.

Metaphorically speaking, there is a kind of “shaking” associated with this aspect

of recognition. Seeing another person step into the bus with you, you recognize him as a

competitor for a remaining seat. In economics, the competition can range from being ri-

vals for a position to the struggle of competing firms for market share. The “creative de-

struction” of capitalism, where firms and their associated towns suffer the devastation

brought by losing the competitive battle, is never far from such recognition. Its prospect

shakes the competitors out of their complacency. Confronting them with the thought not

just of the other enjoying the benefits they seek, but of the consequences of their loss,

they are spurred to greater efforts. Shaking, here, is not just economic, but also social.

Loss of social status is also a loss in one’s claims to be recognized as a subject by the

members of the class from which one has fallen. One no longer has the means to behave

or live as they do and, hence, to be recognized as a corresponding subject. Shaking in

such instances amounts to facing the loss of both economic and social selfhood.26
 22

The second aspect of recognition, which focuses on the alterity of the other,

stands outside of this competitive relation. To the point that the other is other, one cannot

assume in advance that he will seek the same benefits that one desires. The same holds

for his talents and interests. This difference opens the way for a division of labor and the

resulting exchange of goods and services. From an Aristotelian perspective such an ex-

change is essential. It follows from the inherent insufficiency of the isolated individual.

Humans must cooperate to survive. Such cooperation involves their taking on different

roles, each one making up for the deficiencies of the others. It is in terms of such cooper-

ation and the resulting exchanges that Aristotle frames his concept of justice. As he

points out in his Ethics, its sense is that of fairness or equity—isos. It signifies fairness in

exchange. The basic question of justice is: what is an equitable exchange? When, for ex-

ample, a house builder and a shoemaker come to the market, how many shoes would it

take to equal a house? Shoes, of course, cannot be directly exchanged for a house.

Hence, the introduction of money. In Aristotle's words, “A community is formed . . . by

people who are different and unequal. But they must be equalized; and hence everything

that enters into an exchange [e.g., between the shoemaker and the house builder] must

somehow be comparable. For this purpose money has been introduced.”27

Two things are remarkable in this statement. The first is the assertion of the dif-

ference of the individuals making up a community. A community is not made up of peo-

26
This may be the insight behind Hegel’s description of the deadly fight for
recognition between the two pre-selves in the section, “Lordship and Bondage in
the Phenomenology of Spirit.

27
Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: Macmillan Pub-
lishing Company, 1962) 1133a 17-19, p. 125.
 23

ple who are “like” or “equal” to each other. It presupposes their alterity. This means that

the humanity that makes up a community is “plural” in the sense that it involves an irre-

ducible otherness. The second, which is indicated by the mention of money, is the funda-

mental role of economic justice. Given that people form a state to make up for their in-

sufficiencies by exchanging goods and services, injustice in exchange undermines its

foundation. The self-sufficiency of the human in the state thus presupposes two factors.

The first is the existence of others as other. The second is their equalization through fair

exchanges.

The fact that this aspect of recognition is non-competitive does not mean that it is

without its own form of shaking. To cooperate with another involves taking account of

their perspective of a given situation. To do so, however, can involve putting ones own

categories and interpretations, the ways one makes sense of the world—into question. In

genuine cooperation, the other appears as a self with an authority equal to one’s own. As

such, he is capable of putting ones own selfhood in question. Thus, the more one takes

up his categories, the more one’s own are shaken. At the extreme point, openness to the

other as other can become a trauma, a shaking of one’s very sense of selfhood. Even in

its less extreme forms, the shaking involves different views of the world, different ways

of taking it and, hence, an undermining of one’s certainty with respect to it. The loss of

certainty always involves a certain discomfort. Those who radically question the certain-

ties of a community often provoke a violent reaction. Thus the philosophical shaking ini-

tiated by Socrates resulted in his execution. The same fate overcame Jesus, with his

shaking of the religious certainties of his community. As the mass expulsions and perse-

cutions of ethnic minorities attest, this reaction can be extended to whole groups of peo-
 24

ple. To the point that a growing ethnic minority, whose perspectives and standards are

different from the majority, demands recognition, it can expose itself to an extreme reac-

tion. To genuinely recognize a group is to take seriously its standards for interpreting the

world; but this is to place into question one’s own. Rather than doing so, a community

can simply refuse to recognize the “authority” of the minority community—that is, its

right to be the author of its own standards. What this amounts to is a switch in the mode

of recognition from the cooperative to the competitive. In the competitive, one takes one-

self as the standard. Those who do not act as one does, those whose behavior manifests

different standards, are not taken as subjects. Applying this to the minority, the majority

opens the way to the loss of all moral restraint in its actions towards them.

VI

If the above is correct, then the violence that shakes the state is that which com-

bines both forms of shaking. It takes the shaking that is involved in the recognition of the

otherness of the other and transmutes it into the competitive shaking. That the recogni-

tion of the alterity of others is essential for political life follows from its description as the

“art of compromise.” In its accommodating the multiple interests that make up a state,

politics is the way we deal with our plural condition. Thus, in political life, we assume

that others may not share our interpretation of a given situation. Not seeing it as we do,

they will not act as we would. Their interests may, in fact, be opposed to our own.

Agreement in such instances is a matter of negotiation, of the give-and-take that forms

political compromises. Essential for its action is the recognition of the alterity of the

other parties, of their actually having valid grounds for their positions. When this is re-

placed by the form of recognition that denies the subjectivity of such parties, the process
 25

cannot go forward. Thus, whenever the opposing interests are “demonized,” political

compromise becomes impossible. Agreement becomes simply a matter of power; it oc-

curs through the victor’s suppressing his opponents. To the point that the latter resist, the

way is open for political violence.

To see more clearly into the breakdown of political life, we have to take note of

two very different types of freedom: the first is political, the second is natural. The first

originates in the self-separation that the recognition of the otherness of the other occa-

sions. In this recognition, we put ourselves in the situation of the other. We do so in or-

der to grasp his interpretations of a given situation. Doing so, we separate ourselves from

our own situation and corresponding interpretations. To the point that such recognition

succeeds, we regard these from the perspective of the other. The freedom that here arises

comes from the fact that we can consider neither our situation nor the interpretations that

define it as without alternatives. Viewed from the perspective of the other, they have to

be regarded as things that could be otherwise. Thus, they lose their necessity. Rather

than being taken as necessarily determining us, they have to be regarded as within the

purview of our freedom, that is, as things that we could change.28 The content of the re-

sulting freedom is given by our others. Each time we engage in this form of recognition,

we grasp a different way of being and behaving. Whether we approve or disapprove of it,

28
With this, we have the freedom that Sartre describes when he writes: “For
man to put a particular existent out of circuit is to put himself out of circuit in re-
lation to the existent. In this case he is not subject to it; he is out of reach; it can-
not act on him, for he has retired beyond a nothingness. Descartes, following the
Stoics, has given a name to this possibility, which human reality has, to secrete a
nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Noth-
ingness, trans. Hazel Barnes [New York: Washington Square Press, 1966], p. 60).
 26

the fact that we recognize the other, not just as other, but as a subject like ourselves, sig-

nifies that we recognizes these alternatives as human possibilities, that is, as possibilities

that we could, if we so choose, also actualize.

Given that its origin and the possibilities that form its content come from others,

the freedom just described is social. It cannot exist in any solitary state of nature. Its ab-

sence in such a state is part of the insufficiency of the isolated individual. Insofar as it is

essential to our humanity, we have to say that such humanity only appears in community.

Political life arises from such freedom insofar as it is called on to negotiate some of the

choices that form its content—namely, those that have a collective impact. Insofar as

through political debates, these choices achieve a public presence and, hence, form a part

of the content of our collective freedom, political life also promotes freedom. It is, in

other words, from freedom and for freedom, freedom being both the origin and goal of

political life.29 Such freedom is never abstract. It is always situated in a concrete context,

which is that of the choices we make available to each other. What makes it political is

the fact that it is negotiable in terms of its content. Two factors open it up to compro-

mise. The first is that given our essentially social nature, the unbridgeable alterity of our

humanity is always limited. Humans form a plurality in the above defined sense, yet

there is always an overlap in their interpretations. The meanings they give to various sit-

uations are shared, but not entirely. That they are shared means that there are always

29
Here we agree with the Czech political philosopher, Jan Patoc˚ka. He
writes, “political life in its original and primordial form is nothing other than ac-
tive freedom itself.” It is a life that exists “from freedom for freedom” (Jan Pa-
toc˚ka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohák, ed.
James Dodd [Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1996], p. 142).
 27

some points that can be assumed in political negotiations. The second factor is the non-

coincidence within this coincidence, that is, the non-overlap of their interpretations. This

points to the fact that there are always some benefits that are more attractive to one party

rather than to others and, hence, subject to compromise. They form the negotiatible con-

tent of our freedom.

The case is very different with the natural liberty assumed by the social contract

theorists. They take the basis of political power to be an innate, natural liberty. As John

Locke expresses this, “To understand political power right[ly] and derive it from its origi-

nal, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect

freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think

fit.”30 For Hobbes, this freedom “is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he

will himself, for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of his own life” in the

state of war that exists before society (Leviathan, p. 99). In this state, freedom aims as

mastery. Its understanding of sovereignty is solely in these terms. Thus, the individual’s

relation to his others is competitive rather than cooperative. The others that he does en-

counter are taken to desire the same things that he does. Since the subjects he recognizes

are like him, they cannot enrich the content of his freedom. The same factor makes this

natural liberty incapable of compromise. Since it does not take into account the alterity

of others, that is, their differing interpretations of a given situation, liberty, here, lacks

any negotiable content. For the same reason, it cannot avail itself of the advantages of

cooperating with others, that is, of making use of differing talents and interests for a mu-

tual benefit. Inherently, then, the lack of social context for natural liberty means that

30
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, §4 (New York: Library
of Liberal Arts Press, 1952), p. 4.
 28

there are no natural limits to it. This is why Hobbes asserts that such limits must come

from outside of the individual, namely, from the “terror” occasioned by the “Power and

Strength” of the sovereign (Leviathan, p. 132).

Given the essentially violent character of natural liberty, its conflation with politi-

cal freedom necessarily rends the political fabric. This cannot be otherwise given that the

freedom that knows no limits inevitably works to undermine the “rules of the game” of

political life, the very rules that were set up to impose limits on the participants of the

game. The sign of this breakdown is the conflation of freedom with sovereignty, under-

stood as “mastership.” Behind this is the conflation of what we have called political free-

dom with the natural liberty of the social contract theorists. The ultimate basis of the

breakdown is, however, the running together of two different types of intersubjective

recognition: the competitive and the cooperative. It is this conflation, which the shaking

that it results in, that opens the door to political violence.

VII

Such violence cannot be eliminated by suppressing the competitive type of recog-

nition. In fact, the conflation of the two aspects of recognition is always possible since

both are equiprimordial as both constitute our recognition of others. In such recognition,

the transfer of the sense of being a conscious subject goes both ways. Each of us trans-

fers to the other our sense of being a subject, that is, our interpretations of what motivates

behavior. We also transfer to ourselves the other’s different grasp of the situation as evi-

denced by his physical and verbal behavior. What this signifies is that both the Hobbe-

sian and Aristotelian analyses, to the point that they privilege one form of recognition

over the other, are both one-sided. Intersubjective recognition is, in fact, both coopera-
 29

tive and competitive. Thus, people cooperate in order to compete, while the drive to-

wards cooperation, the drive that, for Aristotle, leads to the founding of the state, can

both overcome and make use of our competitive drives.

Given that the situation is always a mixed one, we cannot really maintain the di-

chotomy between the states of nature and society as if the two could be thought apart.

Such states are, phenomenologically speaking, simply code words for two equiprimordial

forms of recognition. This means that the presence of the state of nature in society is the

presence of the competitive relation within the cooperative. This presence of the “sover-

eign exception” is, in other words, within us. In the absence of any social constraints, this

presence is necessarily violent. Thus, political violence occurs when we fail to manage

the competitive relation, that is, fail to impose on it the “rules of the game” of political

life. Such a failure generally involves a failure to recognize its nature, that is, to see that

that the freedom it expresses requires external restraints. What Benjamin and Agamben

refer to as the “founding violence” of the state is, then, a sign of its dissolution. Violence

is not a maintainer of the public space. Its appearance at its breakdown is simply a sign

of the insufficiency of humanity in the absence of such space. This space becomes

eroded when we fail to perceive the difference between the freedom that we gain from

others and the freedom that directs itself against others. When politics becomes a “com-

petitive sport,” when the political and the economic spheres are conflated such that the

recognition that functions in economic competition becomes the model for political life,

the space for political life diminishes. Correspondingly, the possibilities for preventing

political violence also decrease. To prevent such violence, this space, which is essen-

tially a moral one, must be kept open. We must recognize it for what it is: namely, the
 30

space multiply determined by our others, the space of the freedom that their alterity af-

fords us. All the rules of the game of political life have to be judged on how they pre-

serve this space. The moral authority of such rules is that of this space itself.
31