On Violence

On Violence | By Hannah Arendt

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

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 glamorisation of violence by revolutionary causes, and argues that true, lasting power can never grow 'out of the barrel of a gun'.

With an introduction by Arendt expert, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham.