Over the past summer, Hong Kong underwent one of its most pronounced political conflicts in its history. Opposition that was originally directed towards a controversial, flawed bill evolved into a persistent and regularised series of protests against government ineptitude, socioeconomic inequalities, political deadlocks and incompetence, and perceived encroachment upon the core values and liberties of Hong Kongers. Increasingly frequently, these protests have slipped into violence as radical extremists from both ends of the political spectrum clash, but also as the police employ what many perceive to be excessive force against protesters. Most recently, the first live round was fired by a police officer during National Day this past Tuesday.
We see proliferate violence across a variety of contexts, whether it be in the deployment of “implements” against i) inanimate objects and public property (e.g. metro stations, street lamp posts, or roads charred with fires set up by radical opposition protesters; or the destruction of symbolically prominent “Lennon Walls” by pro-Establishment extremists) or, potentially worse, ii) individuals – the case-in-point being the indiscriminate beating of civilians on July 21st in Yuen Long, a rural town notably proximate to the border between Hong Kong and the Mainland. Increasingly ubiquitous skirmishes and altercations between individuals of different political orientations reflect the instrumentally destructive nature of implements of violence, coalescing around the common ground of seeking to decimate the voices of those who dare dissent. Perhaps Schmitt is indeed correct: politics is a life and death matter, rooted in friendships and enmities. Violence in Hong Kong remains an ongoing affair, and I hope this article aids us in understanding and addressing it.
This article is not about exploring the political or constitutional aspects of the underlying factors in the ongoing movement. Whilst these factors are certainly normative embedded within the questions that would be asked, they would take a relative backseat when compared with the question, “How should we normatively assess the violence in Hong Kong?” The following piece makes two contributions to the discussion: the first is to apply Arendt’s thoughts on violence to aid us in making analytical sense of the current violence; the second is, through quasi-reflective equilibrium methods, to amend and modify our understandings of Arendt’s arguments on violence. Under the first, I argue that the Arendtian account demonstrates that violence is illegitimate, but the extent to which it is justified remains a broadly empirical and consequentialist question – founded upon an augmentation to Arendt’s understanding of violence that differentiates between two kinds of justification. For the second, I argue that Arendt’s reasoning as to why violence is illegitimate (given its difference to action) is partially flawed, and is founded upon certain implicit idealization that must be explicitly spelt out in order for her claims to stand.
Hannah Arendt’s writings on violence remain among her most influential and well-known works to many non-philosophical readers. In particular, her attempts to characterize violence as effectively being the antithesis to power have meant that her comments on violence are often cited as the primary authoritative theoretical contribution rebuking violence’s legitimacy, even its justifiability or normativity, in a variety of political contexts.
Understanding Arendt’s conception of violence requires some preliminary appreciation of her account of power. To Arendt, power does not constitute a vector or description of how agents directly affect one another. Instead, power is the “human ability not just to act but to act in concert”; it is not an individualistic characteristic, but describes the political concertedness and unity across a group of coordinated individuals. In sharp contrast to power’s intrinsic value, “violence is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence…are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength.” Arendt pens her thoughts in response to a global age of militarization—both in recognition of the nuclear weapon developments under World War Two, and in reflection and semi-preemption of the surge in military technology in Russia and the US during the Cold War.
Arising from the Hong Kong context are two points worth reflecting upon about the Arendtian conception of violence. The first is the case for expanding violence beyond merely a realm bound by the existence of “implements of violence”—physical violence such as street brawls or direct assaults draw upon raw strength, without seeking the “aid” of implements or external tools that amplify strength. The multiplication of natural strength could be attained without resorting to “implements”, through individuals performing in ways that transgress ordinary moral constraints upon their behaviors. The pro-establishment protester ripping to shreds protest posters is deploying no particular instrument, but their “strength” transgresses the expectations of civility and self-restraint, and manifests through primal destruction.
The second is the need to clarify how Arendt’s analysis of violence extends to state apparatus, such as disciplinary forces (e.g. the police). Some critics of Arendt may argue that Arendt is ignorantly and puritanically averse to the idea that the state itself is constitutive in violence – this indeed sets her apart from other prominent theorists of violence such as Fanon, Sartre, and Marxists who view violence as an instrument of the oppressive capitalist class in legitimating their rule. These critics chastise her for subscribing to the belief that when power and violence meet, the former always triumphs—particularly in the case of governments. They cite her in saying, “power is indeed of the essence of all government…Power is“ an end in itself where ”the power structure [of the government] precedes and outlasts all aims, so that power, far from being the means to an end, is actually the very condition that enables a group of people to think and act according to means and ends.” It appears that Arendt over-glorifies power and idealizes away the presence of violence in the contemporary state
Yet such criticisms are founded upon a misreading of Arendt. Arendt’s argument is that where power falters, violence becomes its substitute. In 2019 Hong Kong, its people have limited to no power in the Arendtian sense—political disillusionment and opposition fragmentation have persisted since the subdued ending to the 2014 Umbrella Movement; political spaces have been closed off, both physically (e.g. the Civic Square) and metaphorically (with increasing depoliticisation of issues under a government led predominantly by bureaucrats); the non-elected Executive Council and cabinet are neither the product nor adequate representatives of concerted political action. Despite the city’s affluence, Hong Kong’s people have no power in the Arendtian sense—and neither does its government. Thus violence emerges, per Arendt’s argument, in response to this vacuum.
More importantly, where power falters, the state deploys force in response as a legitimating tool of its governance. Arendt’s analysis can thus be applied to analyzing the heavily militarized and recalcitrant police force’s actions over the past few months. These individuals deploy force using implements of violence so as to seek the restoration of de facto influence and control to the hands of the rulers. Yet by shutting down discursive spaces and instrumentalizing the bodies of the very agents they are intended to protect or defend, such actions are futile in restoring power to the rule: there was no power to speak of in the first place. Arendt’s account can be applied globally in deconstructing police violence across the world – it arises in response to a dissipation of power, yet does little in restoring power to the government.
The above observes that violence may exist in a wider number of instances than Arendt explicitly acknowledges (even though her framework is clearly compatible with such an argument). The next question to ask is thus, is violence legitimate?
Arendt offers a resounding “No!”; her primary strategy appeals to distinguishing between power, which can be conditionally legitimate; and violence, which is illegitimate. Peeters observes four purported distinctions that Arendt offers: the first is that violence is fundamentally instrumental, whereas power is non-instrumental; the second is that power derives its legitimacy “from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow”, whereas violence lacks a basis of legitimacy for it does not feature people getting together in a political manner; the third concerns violence’s incapability of producing speech, whereas power originates from the political speech and word that permeates life in the idealized polis; the fourth is that violence is “characteristic by its preference for isolation.”, for “the weapon commander is anonymous and remains interchangeable”.
Hong Kong seemingly offers an illuminating counter-example to many of her claims here. To her (second) worry that violence does not feature individuals acting together in a political manner, what Arendt perhaps neglects is the ability of individuals to construct and form political identities through violence around which they rally and engage in discourse—such as the discourses of “brotherhood” and “building a better Hong Kong” that Hong Kong protesters have taken to adopting. The movement – through its horizontal organization – champions an ahierarchical and non-dominated mode of mutual interdependence and exchange amongst its members. These exchanges are oriented around pursuing goals that are beyond what Arendt chastises to be primordial needs of basic material interests – indeed, scholars have argued that this movement typifies the archetypal post-materialist movement in a flawed democracy. Examples for such discourses can be found in the words and thoughts of protesters displayed online, in a large variety of campaigning materials.
Despite the movement’s interchangeability of identities (which Arendt is plausibly correct about) resulting from the proclivity of most protesters in donning masks that anonymize their identities, it is unclear why such superficial secrecy culminates at a fundamental “preference for isolation” (her fourth distinction between power and violence). Protesters apparently do act together, and their explicitly aspirational nature (at least from their perspective) seemingly connotes sufficiently political action.
Per her fourth distinction, Arendt dismisses social movements’ group cohesion and “brotherhood” as being inevitably bound to the transient altercations and confrontations culminating at death – which she characterizes as a deeply anti-political experience, because there could be no speech or action after death. In other words, cohesion and brotherhood, she opines, are meaningless in their culmination at the perishing of the actors involved.
Yet such logic is tenuous, at best. Most violent protesters in Hong Kong are not motivated by or performing in ways that resemble the pursuit of death—they view violent tactics (regardless of what one may think of their normativities) as expressive, cathartic, but also strategic actions oriented towards securing concessions from the regime, as opposed to death. To the extent that Arendt is concerned about those who are affixed to their romantic demises (these individuals are known as “Death Warriors” in Cantonese) as their strategic ends, it is unclear why the very act of dying itself could not be the ultimate form of political speech—as a critique of injustice, or a defiant gesture in face of individuals in the regime who seek to control their own citizens’ lives and deaths. Violence is not inextricably bound up with death, and death is by no means apolitical save from under Arendt’s rather specific and monist conception of the political.
More potent, perhaps, is Arendt’s third distinction, on the silencing effect of violence. Arendt is skeptical of violence’s ability to be or produce speech. Arendt takes speech to denote, more specifically, persuasion. Individuals who produce speech are committed to employing it to convince and justify others—to supply reasons that can ground new beliefs or changes in beliefs. Speech is crucial in fostering political power, for it guides individuals’ coordination, facilitates individuals in cultivating public-mindedness, and enables individuals to pursue the unique telos of human beings: communication and understanding. In Arendt’s eyes, violence silences speech: “where violence rules absolutely, everything and everybody must fall silent”.
The rejoinder to Arendt, in Hong Kong’s context, may be that violence itself is speech. It is a speech-act that directly sabotages and confronts the legitimacy of the law, situating the protests within a broader critique of the tenuous moral underpinnings of the Hong Kong government’s rule; it is also expressive of the substantial, pent-up anger the youths hold in response to persistent socioeconomic inequalities and administrative ineptitude. Violence can be epistemically productive as a clarificatory act that enables the movement to better see their oppression. Not only is violence speech, it is speech of the highest kind: speech embodied by and typified by the collective display and celebration of precariousness, communicated through the dialectic between vulnerability and strength of the human body. Such analysis seems to cast into question Arendt’s rather absolutist and prescriptive understanding of speech.
The prospective defense of Arendt’s argument could be found in her discussion of violence’s “silencing of the law”, as well as the consequential argument that violence tends to crowd out and chill speech by individuals who “must fall silent.” The extent to which violence in Hong Kong is legitimate, therefore, somewhat depends upon the extent to which one finds the silencing of non-violent or excluded agents a morally pressing demand, and a demand more pressing than the protesters on the streets. Hong Kong remains divided over this issue, and there are few who could offer perspicuous answers on this issue.
Let us now turn to the first (and last in order of discussion) distinction: on instrumentality. Arendt sees violence as illegitimate for it can never serve as an end in itself. Suppose we grant that “being an end in itself” is a unique legitimacy-making feature – even then, it remains unclear as to why violence cannot be an end – perhaps there indeed are individuals who seek to destroy for the sake of destruction, who view and pursue annihilation, as opposed to creation, as the end objective of their actions. Indeed, some among the violent protesters in Hong Kong have donned a mutually destructive mentality that seeks to “burn the city down” as a vengeful act in response to what they view to be fundamental injustice. Arendt may benefit from a better-specified theory of what counts as an end, for her argument here to stand.
What I posit this statement needs, therefore, is a qualifier—it is not that violence can never be an end ad simpliciter, but that within an ideal polis, violence never exists as an end. To disrupt and sabotage the polis’s life, to destroy its laws and governing institutions through violence, is illegitimate at its core. Yet this brings us to a deeper set of questions.
Given that we are no residents of polis, and given that we are far from this aspirational ideal, what should be the ethics by which we are governed? Must we adhere, still, to the puritanism championed under the notion of pursuing something as an end and not a means? Even if we grant that violence is indeed illegitimate, given the first and third distinctions between power and violence, can violence be justified?
Arendt’s argument is that violence is justified insofar as it is effective in attaining its end; this sets it apart from power, which is justified independent of its ends. She then hypothesizes that violence can only be justified in the short-term, because its sole utility lies with the achievement of short-term goals. Long-term goals, she reasons, are fundamentally unattainable through violence given the latter’s unpredictability and tendency to descend into unforeseen consequences.
There are reasons why Arendt is at her most persuasive here—particularly within Hong Kong’s unique context. Whilst some have argued that violence was effective in unlocking or garnering support and temporary concessions from the regime, many have also noted that it remains an untenable and unsustainable strategy in the long-run. Violence from the protesters has been met with escalating violence from the police, accompanied by an increasingly staunch rebuking of the movement by both the Central (Beijing) and Hong Kong governments. Arendt warns of violence’s being “infected by the unpredictability that is typical of action,” and its tendency to lead to irreversible impacts: “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”
Yet her rather brief remarks on justifiability would perhaps be strengthened if we are to introduce a new conceptual distinction: the local justifiability of violence pertains to whether violence is justifiable by a moral agent in light of both their knowledge and immediate moral surroundings, whereas the global justifiability of violence concerns the justifiability of violence, all-things-considered. The former is an agent-centric notion in that it examines efficacy and effectiveness through the lenses of a well-informed but epistemically constrained agent; the latter pertains to violence from an “external standpoint” (whether it be the view from an intersubjective consensus, per Habermas or Nagel, or a view from an omniscient observer is beside the point).
Arendt’s caveats about justifiability straddle both categories of justifiability. Inefficacy and inability to attain one’s strategic objectives fall under the former, whereas her warning of a “more violent world” falls under the latter. Arendt’s account of violence’s potential justifiability works best when taken on two levels—first on the level of the agent, and second on a global, consequentialist level. In Hong Kong’s context, the rhetoric of violence-wielding parties – both police and protesters included – is that violence is locally justified. Protesters characterize violence as helpful in attaining their aspirational goals; police view violence as the warranted response to undermining of law and order; counter-protesters seek out violence as a tool of oppressing and silencing protesters with whom they disagree. Yet the question of global justifiability remains largely mute and under-discussed. What consequences would follow from violence, and how should we appraise them if we are to assume that some degree of equal considerations of interests is necessary?
Some would argue here, and not without grounds, that the question of global justifiability (and Arendt’s musings about the dangers of violence) is irrelevant to the archetypal activist. The split-second of decision-making allows for little to no authentic moral deliberation; neither should we demand total justifiability of actions in a ‘tragic dilemma’ (cf. virtue ethics) where all options are seemingly illegitimate and partially unjustified. Some, still, would argue that Arendt’s bleak rejection of violence’s efficacy is ahistorical and empirically ungrounded.
Yet despite the many other flaws in Arendt’s account, these critiques seemingly miss the point. On the latter, this challenge (as channeled by the likes of Chomsky) neglects Arendt’s nuanced distinction between viewing violence as a potentially efficacious tool of reform, and as a certainly inefficacious tool of revolution; her warnings of the epistemic uncertainty and dangerous spillover effects of violence are both timely and veracious. Towards the former, this critique deals little damage to Arendt. Arendt is concerned with many questions, and the prescriptive question (of how to act) is but one of them.
The moral question of violence is difficult to navigate, and even harder to answer comprehensively and authentically. It is certainly not the case that Arendt alone yields all of the necessary insights into how to behave in times as tumultuous as these. The ethics of activism – as noted by many authors, from Shelby and bell hooks to Lorde and Butler—is inherently murky given the substantial constraints confining activists. Yet as with all other practices in life, activism must be bound and modified by well-reasoned standards and reflections founded upon accurate interpretations of the past and present. Arendt’s theory of violence – despite its limitations and room for reconstruction – offers us a framework for doing so in Hong Kong.
As for Hong Kong, whilst some are optimistic that violence has its moments of efficacy, it is unclear if this strategy is indeed efficacious, locally justified, or holistically justified in the long run. As the resentment and costs of violence from all parties accumulate, Hong Kong edges closer and closer to armageddon. Perhaps the solution lies in a more dynamic and fluid reimagining of the polis, constituted not through violence, but equal and symmetric discourse: yet the prerequisite for this lies with the government—we can only hope that there will be substantial changes before it is too late.
Brian Wong
Brian Wong is an MPhil in Politics (Theory) student at the University of Oxford. They graduated from Oxford with a First Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2018. They are primarily interested in topics that intersect political theory, normative ethics, meta-ethics, and metaphysics; their current research focuses on the link between historical injustice and obligations of contemporary non-state actors. They are also the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review.
