On Violence

From Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her influential essay examining the relationship between violence, power, war and politics

'Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it'

Why has violence played such a significant role in human history? Written in 1970, with the Holocaust and Hiroshima still fresh in recent memory, war in Vietnam raging and the streets of Europe and America exploding into student protest, Hannah Arendt's seminal work dissects violence in the twentieth century: its nature and causes, its relationship with politics and war, its role in the modern age. Arendt warns against the glamorization of violence by revolutionary causes, and argues that true, lasting power can never grow 'out of the barrel of a gun'.