From Violence to Terror: Beyond Instrumental Violence in Hannah Arendt´s Political Thought

Abstrakt

Hannah Arendt, victim and witness of
totalitarian violence, confronted the glorification
of violence with her philosophical and
political theory. However, she was not a pacifist,
because she was aware that “under certain
circumstances violence is the only way to set
the scales of justice right again” [Arendt, 1970,
p. 64]. This ambivalence reveals the boundless
character of violence in any attempt to
conceptualize it. When she defines violence,
she does it in instrumental terms in two complementary
ways: violence requires instruments,
and it is instrumental in itself. Meansend
rationality crosses the phenomenon of
violence, and this is why the question about
decency of means appears to be essential.
However, Arendt knew that the own dynamic 

of violence tends to go beyond its own limits
in which it would remain enclosed. This paper
aims to recover those tools provided by her
work to analyze the overwhelming and generative
character of violence which, abandoned
to its own logic, loses the distinction between
means and aims. This is a type of violence
that it is not a means, but an end in itself, and,
in Arendtian terms, is no more instrumental
violence because it turns into “total terror”:
an indiscriminate violence which becomes its
own purpose.
Keywords: Hannah Arendt, violence,
means, end, instruments, instrumental rationality,
terror, overwhelming, dispensability.