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Hannah Arendt
About violence

Published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

© 1969, 1970 by Hannah Arendt

© New publishing house, 2014

To my friend Mary

Chapter first

The reason for these reflections were the events and discussions of the last few years, considered in the context of the entire 20th century, which indeed turned out, as Lenin predicted, to be a century of wars and revolutions, and therefore a century of violence, which is considered to be their common denominator. In the current situation, however, there is another factor which, although not predicted by anyone, is at least as important. The technical evolution of instruments of violence has now reached such a stage that it is no longer possible to imagine any political purpose that would correspond to their destructive potential or justify their practical use in armed conflict. Therefore, war - since time immemorial the ruthless supreme arbiter of international disputes - has lost much of its effectiveness and almost all of its luster. The “apocalyptic” chess game between the superpowers, that is, between states operating at the highest stage of development of our civilization, is played in accordance with the rule “whoever wins, the end of both” 1
Wheeler H. The Strategic Calculators // Calder N. Unless Peace Comes. New York: Viking, 1968. P. 109.

; it is a game devoid of any resemblance to any previous war games. Its “rational” goal is deterrence, not victory, and since the arms race is no longer a preparation for war, it can now be justified only on the basis that the greatest deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. The question of how we will ever extricate ourselves from the obvious madness of this situation remains unanswered.

Because violence, unlike power ( power), strength ( force) or power ( strength) – always needs guns(as Engels pointed out long ago 2
Engels F. Herrn Eugen Duhrings Umwalzung der Wissenschaft. Part II, ch. 3 [ Engels F. Anti-Dühring: The revolution in science carried out by Mr. Eugene Dühring // Marx K., Engels F. Collected Works: In 50 volumes. M., 1961. T. 20. pp. 170–178].

), then the technological revolution, the revolution in the manufacture of tools, was especially noticeable in military affairs. The very essence of violent action is governed by the category “means-end,” and in relation to human affairs, the main property of this category is the risk that the goal will be subordinated to the means that it justifies and that are required to achieve it. And since the final end of human action, unlike the final product of production, is not reliably foreseeable, the means used to achieve political ends usually have a greater influence on the future of the world than the intended ends.

The results of any human actions are not subject to the control of the actors, but violence also contains an additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortune, that is, good or bad luck, play such a fateful role in human affairs as on the battlefield, and this invasion of the unexpected will not disappear if it is called a “chance event” and considered doubtful from a scientific point of view; just as it cannot be eliminated with the help of modeling, [developing] scenarios, game theory, etc. In such matters there is no certainty, not even the final certainty of mutual destruction under such and such calculated conditions. The very fact that those who perfect the means of destruction have finally reached such a level of technical development where, thanks to the means at their disposal, their very goal, namely war, is on the verge of complete extinction 3
As General André Beaufre points out in Battlefields in the 1980s, only “in parts of the world not yet covered by nuclear deterrence” is war still possible, and even this “conventional war,” despite its horrors, is already effectively limited by a constant threat escalation into nuclear war (quoted from: Calder N. Op. cit. P. 3).

, - this very fact serves as an ironic reminder of the omnipresent unpredictability that we face as soon as we approach the sphere of violence. The main reason why war has not yet left us is not the secret desire for death inherent in the human species, not the indomitable instinct of aggression, not (the last and more plausible answer) the serious economic and social dangers associated with disarmament 4
"Report from Iron Mountain" (New York, 1967) - a satire on the way of thinking of the RAND Corporation and other think tanks ( think tanks); her “timid attempt to look beyond the edges of peacetime” is perhaps closer to reality than most “serious” studies. Its main thesis - that war is so fundamental to the functioning of our society that we will not risk abolishing it unless we find even more murderous ways to solve our problems - is shocking only to those who have forgotten that the unemployment crisis of the Great Depression was solved only with the outbreak of the Second World War, or those who find it more convenient to ignore or downplay the scale of modern hidden unemployment.

And the simple fact is that there is still no replacement for this final arbiter in international affairs on the political stage. Wasn't Hobbes right when he said: “Treaties without the sword are mere words?”

And it is unlikely that such a replacement will appear as long as national independence, that is, freedom from foreign domination, is identified ( rule), and state sovereignty, i.e. a claim to unrestrained and unlimited power ( power) in international affairs. (The United States is one of the few countries where a proper division of independence and sovereignty is possible, at least in theory, so long as such a division would not threaten the very foundations of the American republic. According to the American Constitution, international treaties form an integral part of federal law and - as noted in 1793 Judge James Wilson - "the concept of sovereignty is completely unknown to the United States Constitution." But the days of such sober and proud detachment from the traditional language and conceptual political scheme of the European nation-state are long gone; the legacy of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better or worse, has become the heir Europe, as if inheriting its ancestral heritage, unaware, alas, of the fact that the decline of European power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of the national state and its concept of sovereignty.) That the war still remains ultima ratio[the latter argument], the continuation of a policy of violent means in relations between undeveloped countries, cannot serve as an argument against its obsolescence, and there cannot be any consolation in the fact that only small countries without nuclear and biological weapons can still afford to fight. It's no secret that the notorious "random event" [that would trigger a nuclear war] is most likely to occur in those parts of the planet where the ancient maxim "victory has no alternative" is still close to the truth.

Under such circumstances, there are indeed few things more fearful than the steadily growing authority of science-oriented experts in government deliberations in recent decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they don’t think. Instead of doing this old-fashioned non-computerized activity, they calculate the consequences of certain hypothetically possible configurations, however, without being able to test their hypotheses against real facts. The logical flaw in these hypothetical future scenarios is always the same: what initially appears as a hypothesis - with or without implied alternatives, depending on the degree of sophistication of the scenario - instantly, usually after a few paragraphs, turns into a "fact" that then it generates a whole chain of the same non-facts, and as a result, the purely speculative nature of the entire construction is forgotten. Needless to say, this is not science, but pseudoscience - or, to use Noam Chomsky's definition, "a desperate attempt by the social and behavioral sciences to imitate the appearance of sciences that actually have significant intellectual content." And (as Richard N. Goodwin recently pointed out in a review article that had the rare quality of revealing the “unconscious humor” characteristic of many bombastic pseudoscientific theories) the most obvious and “most profound objection to this brand of strategic theory is not its lack of usefulness, but its danger is that it can convince us that we have an understanding of events and control over their course, which we actually do not have.” 5
Quote By: Chomsky N. American Power and the New Mandarines. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969; Goodwin R. Review of Thomas C. Schelling “Arms and Influence” (Yale, 1966) // The New Yorker. 1968. February 17.

Events are, by definition, such occurrences ( occurrences) that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; Only in a world where nothing significant ever happens can the visions of futurists come true. Predictions of the future are always just projections of current automatic processes and procedures, that is, of those incidents that are supposed to happen if people do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident ( accident) inevitably destroy the entire scheme within which the prediction exists and within which it finds its data. (Fortunately, Proudhon's casual remark is still true:

“The fruitfulness of the unexpected far exceeds the foresight of the statesman.” It is even more obvious that it exceeds the expert’s calculations.) Name such unforeseen, unforeseen and unpredictable incidents ( happenings) "random events" ( random events) or “the last spasms of the past”, dooming them to insignificance or to the notorious “dustbin of history” - this is the most ancient technique of the predictive craft; This technique undoubtedly helps theoretical harmony, but only at the cost of further distance between theory and reality. The danger lies not only in the plausibility of these theories, since they actually take their data from recognizable current trends, but also in the fact that, due to their internal coherence, they have a hypnotic effect - they lull our common sense, which is nothing more than our mental an organ designed to perceive, understand, and interact with reality and factuality.

No one who has thought about history and politics can fail to recognize the enormous role that violence has always played in human affairs, and at first glance it is even surprising that violence has so rarely been made the subject of special consideration 6
Of course, there is a vast literature on wars and types of war, but it is about the instruments of violence, not about violence as such.

. (In the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, “violence” did not even deserve a separate entry.) This shows how violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore remained neglected; no one studies or questions what is obvious to everyone. Those who saw nothing but violence in human affairs and were convinced that they are “always accidental, frivolous, imprecise” (Renan) or that God is always on the side of large battalions, nothing beyond this is either about violence or about history they couldn't say. Anyone who looked for any meaning in the chronicles of the past was almost forced to consider violence as a marginal phenomenon. Whether it was Clausewitz who called war "the continuation of politics by other means" or Engels who called violence "an accelerator of economic development" 7
Engels F. Op. cit. Part II, ch.4 [ Engels F. Decree. op. pp. 179–189].

The emphasis was on political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded the act of violence. Therefore, scholars of international relations until recently took it as an axiom that “a military solution that does not correspond to the deep cultural sources of national power cannot be stable,” or that “whenever a country’s power structure contradicts its economic development,” political power fails with her means of violence 8
Wheeler H. The Strategic Calculators // Calder N. Op. cit. P. 107; Engels F. Op. cit.

Today, all these old truths about the relationship between war and politics, or about violence and power, have become inapplicable. What followed World War II was not peace, but the Cold War and the creation of the military-industrial-trade union complex. Today, much more plausible than the 19th-century formulas of Engels or Clausewitz are the words about “the priority of military potential as the main structuring force in society” or the assertion that “economic systems, political philosophies and legal systems serve and expand the military system, but not vice versa.” , or the conclusions that “war is itself a basic social system within which secondary modes of social organization conflict or cooperate.” Even more convincing than the simple inversion proposed by the anonymous author of the "Report from the Iron Mountain" - that it is no longer war that is "the continuation of diplomacy, or politics, or the achievement of economic goals," but peace is the continuation of war by other means - is even more convincing actual development of military technologies. According to the Russian physicist Sakharov, “thermonuclear war cannot be considered as a continuation of politics by military means (according to Clausewitz’s formula), but is a means of global suicide.” 9
Sakharov A. D. Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. New York, 1968. P. 36 [ Sakharov A. D. Reflections on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom // Sakharov A. D. Anxiety and hope. M., 2006. T. I. P. 77–78].

Moreover, we know that “a small quantity of arms can destroy in a few moments all other sources of national power.” 10
Wheeler H. Op. cit.

That biological weapons have already been invented, with the help of which “a small group of individuals ... can upset the strategic balance” and which are quite cheap and therefore can be produced in “countries that are not capable of developing nuclear strike forces” 11
Calder N. The New Weapons // Calder N. Op. cit. P. 239.

That “in a few years” robot soldiers will “completely replace human soldiers” 12
Thring M.W. Robots on the March // Ibid. P. 169.

And that, finally, in a conventional war, poor countries are much less vulnerable than great powers, precisely because they are “underdeveloped,” and because in guerrilla wars, technical superiority can “turn out to be a weak point rather than a strong point.” 13
Dedijer V. The Poor Man's Power // Ibid. P. 29.

Taken together, all these unpleasant innovations lead to a complete upheaval in the relationship between power and violence, foreshadowing a future upheaval in the relations between small and big powers. The amount of violence at the disposal of a particular country may soon no longer be a reliable indicator of that country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a significantly smaller and weaker power. And here there is an ominous similarity with one of the most ancient intuitions of political science - that power ( power) cannot be measured in terms of wealth, that the abundance of wealth can weaken power, that the rich are especially dangerous for the power and well-being of republics. Although this intuition was forgotten, it did not lose its significance, especially now that its truth has acquired additional significance, having also become applicable to the arsenal of violence.

The more dubious and unreliable violence becomes in international relations, the more prestige and attractiveness it acquires in domestic affairs, especially in the matter of revolution. The intense Marxist rhetoric of the New Left coincides with the steady rise of the entirely un-Marxist faith promulgated by Mao Zedong—the belief that “power grows from the barrel of a rifle.” Of course, Marx was aware of the role of violence in history, but for him this role was secondary; It was not violence, but contradictions within the old society that led this society to destruction. Outbreaks of violence preceded the emergence of a new society, but were not its cause, and Marx compared these outbreaks to the birth pangs that precede the event of birth, but of course do not cause it. He viewed the state in the same spirit - it is an instrument of violence in the service of the ruling class, but the real power of the ruling class does not lie in violence and is not based on violence. It is determined by the role that this ruling class plays in society, or, more precisely, by its role in the process of production.

It has often been (sometimes lamentably) noted that, under the influence of Marx's teachings, the revolutionary left movement renounced the use of violent means. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” openly repressive in Marx’s texts, was supposed to come only after the revolution and, like the Roman dictatorship, was designed for a strictly limited period. Political assassinations, with the exception of a few acts of individual terror carried out by small groups of anarchists, were the preserve of the right, while organized armed uprisings remained a specialty of the military. The left was convinced “that all sorts of conspiracies are not only useless, but also harmful. They know very well that revolutions cannot be made deliberately and arbitrarily, and that revolutions have always and everywhere been a necessary consequence of circumstances that were completely independent of the will and leadership of individual parties and entire classes.” 14
I quote this early remark of Engels from an 1847 manuscript from: Barion J. Hegel und die marxistische Staatslehre. Bonn, 1963 [ Engels F. Principles of communism // Marx K., Engels F. Collected works: B 50 T. M., 1955. T.4. P.331].

True, in the field of theory there were several exceptions. Georges Sorel, who at the beginning of the century attempted to combine Marxism with Bergson's philosophy of life (the result, although at a much lower level of intellectual sophistication, is strangely reminiscent of Sartre's current fusion of existentialism and Marxism), thought about class struggle in military terms; however, he ultimately proposed nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike—a form of action we would today think of as belonging to the arsenal of nonviolent politics. But fifty years ago even this modest proposal earned him a reputation as a fascist, despite his enthusiastic approval of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Sartre, who in the preface to Fanon's Curses goes much further in glorifying violence than Sorel in his famous Meditations on Violence, and further than Fanon himself, whose thesis Sartre wants to bring to its logical conclusion, still speaks of "Fascist statements of Sorel". This shows the extent to which Sartre is unaware of his fundamental disagreement with Marx on the issue of violence, especially when he argues that “uncontrollable violence... is man re-creating himself,” that through “mad rage” those “marked with a curse” can “become men.” " This opinion is all the more remarkable since the very idea of ​​man creating himself strictly belongs to the tradition of Hegelian and Marxist thought; this is the very foundation of all left-wing humanism. But, according to Hegel, man “produces” himself through thinking 15
It is very significant that Hegel in this context speaks of Sichselbstproduzieren[self-production]: Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie / Hrsg. von J. Hoffmeister. Leipzig, 1938. P. 114 [ Hegel G. F. W. Lectures on the history of philosophy. St. Petersburg, 1994. Book. 2. P. 158].

Whereas for Marx, who turned Hegel’s “idealism” upside down, this function is performed by labor - the human form of metabolism with nature. And although it could be argued that all ideas about man creating himself are united by a rebellion against the very facticity of the human condition (nothing is more obvious than that man, as a member of a species or an individual, Not owes its existence to itself) and that therefore what unites Sartre, Marx and Hegel is more essential than the [difference] of those concrete activities through which this non-fact [man's creation of himself] is supposed to happen, yet cannot be denied, that such essentially peaceful activities as thinking and work are separated from any acts of violence by a real abyss. “To shoot a European is to catch two birds with one stone... in the end you are left with a dead man and a free man,” says Sartre in the preface. Marx would never have written such a phrase 16
Professor B. K. Parekh (University of Hull, England) kindly drew my attention to the following passage in the section on Feuerbach in The German Ideology (1846) (about this book Engels later wrote: “The completed part ... only proves how incomplete the time was our knowledge of economic history"): "Both for the mass generation of this communist consciousness, and for the achievement of the goal itself, a massive change of people is necessary ( des Menschen), which is only possible in practical movement, in the revolution; therefore, revolution is necessary not only because it is impossible to overthrow the ruling class in any other way, but also because overthrowing Only in revolution can a class throw off all the old abominations and become capable of creating a new basis for society” (quoted from the ed.: Marx K., Engels F. German Ideology/Ed. with an introduction by R. Pascal. New York, 1960. P. xv, 69 [ Marx K., Engels F. German ideology // Marx K., Engels F. Collected works: In 50 volumes. M., 1955. T. 3. P. 70]). Even in these, so to speak, pre-Marxist statements, the difference between the positions of Marx and Sartre is obvious. Marx speaks of the “mass change of men” and the “mass generation of communist consciousness,” rather than the liberation of the individual through an isolated act of violence (for the German text, see: Marx K., Engels F. Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung. Berlin, 1932. Vol. 5. S. 59 ff.).

I quoted Sartre to show that this new turn to violence in the thinking of revolutionaries can go unnoticed even by one of their most revealing and articulate representatives 17
The New Left's unconscious deviation from Marxism did not go unnoticed. See especially recent comments on the student movement by Leonardo Shapiro (New York Review of Books. 1968. December 5) and Raymond Aron ( Aaron R. La Revolution Introuvable. Paris: Fayard, 1968). Both see the reliance on violence as a throwback to either pre-Marxian utopian socialism (Aron) or the Russian anarchism of Nechaev and Bakunin (Shapiro), who “wrote much about the importance of violence as a factor of unity, as a cohesive force in a society or group, a hundred years before how these same ideas were expressed in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon.” Aron writes in the same vein: “The singers of the May revolution think that they have overcome Marxism... they have forgotten about a whole century of historical development” (p. 14). For a non-Marxist, reproach for such regression would hardly be a serious argument; but for Sartre, who, for example, writes: “The so-called “overcoming” of Marxism, at worst, can only be a return to pre-Marxist thinking, at best, the discovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy that is supposed to be overcome” ( Sartre J.–P. Question de Méthode // Sartre J.– P. Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, i960. P. 17 [ Sartre J. – P. Problems of the method. M., 2008. P. 12]), this will be a very serious accusation. (It is noteworthy that Sartre and Aron, although political opponents, are in complete agreement on this point. This shows the extent to which Hegel's concept of history shapes the thinking of Marxists and non-Marxists alike.)
Sartre himself, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, gives a Hegelian explanation for his resort to violence. His starting point is that "need and scarcity have determined the Manichaean basis of action and morality" in modern history, "the truth of which is based on scarcity and must manifest itself in the antagonism between classes." Aggression is a consequence of need in a world where “there is not enough for everyone.” In such conditions, violence ceases to be a marginal phenomenon. “Violence and counter-violence may be contingent, but they are contingent necessities, and the imperative consequence of any attempt to destroy this inhumanity will be that, by destroying the inhumanity of the anti-man in the enemy, I destroy the humanity of man in him and realize in myself his inhumanity. When I kill, torture, enslave, my goal is to suppress his freedom, that is, alien excessive force.” The model for a situation in which “everyone is redundant, redundant to the other” is a bus queue, the members of which apparently “not notice anything in each other except their place in the number line.” Sartre concludes: “They mutually deny any connection between each other’s inner worlds.” And from this it follows that practice is “the negation of otherness, which in itself is negation” - a very convenient conclusion, since the negation of negation is an affirmation.
The error in this reasoning seems obvious to me. There is a huge difference between “not noticing” and “denial”, between “denying any connection” with someone and “denying” his otherness; and for a person of sound mind there is a considerable distance from theoretical “denial” to murder, torture and enslavement.
Most of the quotes given are taken from: Laing R. D., Cooper D. G.. Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960. London: Tavistock publications, 1964. Pt. 3. This seems acceptable to me, since Sartre says in the preface: “I have carefully read the work that you dedicated to me, and to my great pleasure I found here a very clear and correct outline of my thinking.”

And this is all the more remarkable since we are obviously not talking about operations with an abstract concept that is under the jurisdiction of the history of ideas. (Turning the “idealistic” idea around ( concept) thinking, one can come to a materialistic idea ( concept) labor; but it is impossible to arrive at the concept of violence.) Undoubtedly, this turn has its own logic, but it stems from experience, and this experience was completely unknown to any of the previous generations.

Pathos and élan[the impulse of] the new left, its sensibility, so to speak, is closely connected with the ominous suicidal development of modern weapons; this is the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the atomic bomb. From their parents' generation they inherited the experience of a massive invasion of criminal violence into politics: at school and at university they learned about concentration and death camps, about genocide and torture 18
Noam Chomsky correctly identifies among the motives for open rebellion the refusal to “take a place next to the ‘honest Germans’ whom we have all learned to despise” ( Chomsky N. Op. cit. P. 368).

About the mass military extermination of civilians, without which modern military operations are no longer possible, even if limited to “conventional” weapons. Their first reaction was an aversion to any form of violence, an almost automatic adherence to a policy of nonviolence. The very major successes of this movement, especially in the area of ​​civil rights, were followed by the protest movement against the Vietnam War, which remains an important factor in determining public opinion in this country [USA]. But it is by no means a secret that since then the situation has changed, that now the supporters of non-violence have gone on the defensive, and it would be idle talk to say that only “extremists” are engaged in the glorification of violence and only they have discovered (like Fanon’s Algerian peasants) that “only violence effective" 19
Fanon F. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
P. 61. I use this work because of its great influence on the current generation of students. However, Fanon himself is much more skeptical about violence than his admirers. It seems that the general reader has only read the first chapter of this book, “Concerning Violence.” Fanon is aware of the “undivided and total cruelty which, if not immediately suppressed, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks” (Ibid. P. 147).
Regarding the recent escalation of violence in the student movement, see the instructive series of articles "Gewalt" in the German weekly Der Spiegel (1969. February 10 ff); in the same magazine, see the series of articles “Mit dem Latein am Ende” (Ibid. 1969. No. 26–27).

The new militant activists were branded as anarchists, nihilists, red fascists, Nazis and (much more sensibly) “Luddites.” 20
They really form a motley mixture. Radical students easily mix with dropouts, hippies, drug addicts and psychopaths. The situation is further complicated by the fact that authorities fail to recognize the – often subtle – differences between crime and non-compliance, which are important differences. A sit-in and occupation of a building are not the same as arson or armed insurrection, and the difference is not purely quantitative. (Contrary to the opinion of one member of the Harvard Board of Trustees, a student takeover of a university building is not the same as a mob breaking into a First National Bank branch for the simple reason that the students are trespassing on property the use of which is, of course, regulated , but to which they themselves belong and which belongs to them just as much as the faculty and administration.) Even more alarming is the tendency of the faculty and administration to treat drug addicts and criminal elements (at the City College of New York and at Cornell University) much more leniently than to their own rebels.
Helmut Schelsky, a German sociologist, described back in 1961 ( Schelsky H. Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation. Cologne; Opladen, 1961) the possibility of “metaphysical nihilism,” by which he meant a radical social and spiritual negation of “the entire process of human scientific and technological reproduction,” i.e., a “no” said to “the emerging world of scientific civilization.” To call such a position nihilistic means to take the modern world as the only possible world. The protest of young rebels concerns precisely this point. Moreover, it would make perfect sense to blame the accusers themselves and say, as Sheldon Wallin and John Schaar did: “The major threat now is that the ruling and respectable classes seem ready to subscribe to the most nihilistic denial possible.” , that is, the denial of the future through the denial of one’s own children, the bearers of this future" ( Wolin Sh., Shaar J. Op. cit.).
Nathan Glaser, in the article “Student Power at Berkeley,” writes: “Student radicals... remind me more of the car-crashing Luddites than of the socialist unionists who sought full civil rights and power for workers.” Glazer N. Student Power in Berkeley//The Public Interest (special issue “The Universities”). 1968. Fall), and from this he concludes that Zbigniew Brzezinski (in an article about Columbia University: The New Republic. 1968. June I) is apparently right in his diagnosis: “Very often revolutions are the last convulsions of the past, and therefore, in fact, these are not revolutions, but counter-revolutions taking place under the name of revolutions.” Doesn't this passion for moving forward at any cost seem strange in two authors who are usually considered conservative? And doesn't it seem even more strange that Glaser does not recognize the crucial differences between the factory machines of early 19th century England and the technology of the mid 20th century, which turned out to be destructive even in its most beneficent guise - the discovery of nuclear energy, automation, medicine, the healing power of which led to to overpopulation, which in turn will almost certainly lead to mass starvation, air pollution, and so on?

And the students responded with equally meaningless labels - “police state” or “hidden fascism of late capitalism” and (much more reasonably) “consumer society” 21
The last of these epithets would make sense if it were understood descriptively (rather than evaluatively). However, behind it lies Marx’s illusory idea of ​​a society of free producers, of the liberation of productive social forces. In fact, such liberation is achieved not through revolutions, as Marx thought, but through science and technology. Moreover, this liberation was not accelerated, but seriously slowed down in all countries that experienced revolution. In other words, behind the student denunciation of consumption there is an idealization of production, and with it an archaic deification of productivity and creativity. “The joy of destruction is a creative joy” - this is indeed true if you believe that the “joy of work” is productive; destruction is almost the only remaining “work” that can be done with simple tools and without the help of machines, although machines would, of course, do this work much more efficiently.

The reason for their behavior was declared to be all kinds of social and psychological factors: an excess of connivance during their upbringing in America and an explosive reaction to excess authority in Germany and Japan, a lack of freedom in Eastern Europe and an excess of freedom in the West, a catastrophic lack of jobs for young sociologists in France and a superabundance of vacancies in almost every field of activity in the United States. All these factors seem quite convincing at the local level, but are clearly refuted by the fact that the student revolt is a global phenomenon. There can be no talk about the common social denominator of this movement, but it is impossible not to recognize that psychologically this generation is universally distinguished by courage, an amazing will to action and no less amazing confidence in the possibility of change 22
This thirst for action is especially noticeable in small-scale and relatively harmless enterprises. Students successfully protested against campus management who paid staff at the cafe, buildings and grounds of the university less than the legal minimum. That includes Berkeley students' decision to join the fight to turn a vacant university site into a "people's park," even though it resulted in the most violent government response in recent memory. Judging by the incident at Berkeley, it seems that it is precisely such "non-political" actions that cause the student body to rally around the radical vanguard. “In the student referendum, which had the largest turnout in student voting history, 85 percent (of nearly 15,000) votes were cast in favor of using the site” as a public park. See the excellent report: Wolin Sh., Schaar J. Berkeley: The Battle of People's Park // New York Review of Books. I969. June I9.

However, these qualities are not the causes [of the riots], and if we ask what actually led to this - completely unforeseen - development of events in universities around the world, it would be absurd to ignore the most obvious and perhaps most influential factor, not which also has no precedents or analogies, namely the simple fact that technological “progress” so often leads straight to disaster 23
It has become a practice to look for precedents and analogies where they simply do not exist, and to avoid describing and thinking about what is now being said and done in the language of contemporary events themselves, under the pretext that we should learn the lessons of the past, especially the lessons of the period between the two world wars. characteristic of so many contemporary discussions. Quite free from this form of escapism is Stephen Spender's brilliant and intelligent report on the student movement, quoted above. He belongs to those very few representatives of his generation who are both sensitive enough to the present and remember their own youth well enough to recognize all the differences between the two eras in mood, style, thinking and action (“today’s students are completely different from the students of Oxford, Cambridge , Harvard, Princeton or Heidelberg forty years ago" [ Spender S. Op cit. P. 165]). But Spender’s position is shared by all those who are truly concerned about the future of the world and man (no matter what generation they belong to), in contrast to those who play with this future. (Sheldon Wallin and John Schaar speak of a “renewed sense of common destiny” that can bind different generations, of “our common fear that scientific weapons will destroy all life, that technology will increasingly deform urban people as it has desecrated the earth and darkened the sky" that "the progress of industry will destroy the very possibility of interesting work and that communications will erase the last traces of the diverse cultures that have been the heritage of all but the most backward societies" [ Wolin Sh., Shaar J. Op. cit.]) It seems quite natural that this position is more often taken by physicists and biologists, rather than representatives of the social sciences, although students of natural faculties are not such zealous rebels as their fellow humanists. Thus, Adolf Portmann, the famous Swiss biologist, believes that the age gap between generations has little to do with the conflict between young and old - this conflict arises with the advent of nuclear science: “as a result, a completely new state of affairs in the world has arisen ... it cannot even be compared with the most powerful revolution of the past" ( Portmann A. Manipulation des Menschen als Schiksal und Bedrohung. Zürich: Verlag Die Arche, 1969). And Nobel laureate George Wald of Harvard, in his famous speech at the Moscow State University on March 4, 1969, rightly emphasized that teachers understand “the reasons for student anxiety even better than the students themselves,” and, moreover, this anxiety is shared ( Wald G. Op. cit.).

That the sciences taught to this generation not only seem to be unable to correct the catastrophic consequences of their own technology, but have also reached a stage in their development where “virtually nothing can be done that cannot be turned into war.” 24
Jerome Lettvin of MIT thinks so; see: New York Times Magazine. 1969. May 18.

. (To preserve the universities, of course, which, according to Senator Fulbright, betray the public trust once they become dependent on government-funded research projects 25
The modern politicization of universities (a subject of fair regret) is often blamed on rebellious students who allegedly attack universities because they are a weak link in the chain of power. It is quite true that universities will not survive if “intellectual impartiality and the disinterested search for truth” disappear, and, even worse, it is unlikely that any civilized society will be able to survive the disappearance of these strange institutions, the main social and political function of which is precisely their impartiality and independence from public pressure and political power. Power and truth, both completely legitimate in their own sphere, are fundamentally different phenomena, and choosing one or the other as a life goal leads to existentially different life paths. Zbigniew Brzezinski in the article “America in the Technotronic Era” ( Brzezinski Z. America in the Technotronic Age // Encounter. 1968. January) sees this danger, but either has come to terms with it, or is not so alarmed by this prospect. He believes that technotronia will lead to a new “superculture” led by new “intellectuals for whom organizational and applied issues will be central.” (See especially Noam Chomsky's recent critique of The Object activity and liberal sciences» : Chomsky N. Op. cit.) In fact, it is much more likely that this new breed of intellectuals, formerly known as technocrats, will lead to an era of tyranny and extreme sterility.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that before universities were politicized by the student movement, they were politicized by the authorities. The relevant facts are too well known to be cited, but it is worth recalling that we are not talking only about military research here. Henry Steele Commagier recently criticized "the university as an employment agency" (The New Republic, 1968, February 24). Indeed, “no amount of imaginative effort can make one imagine the Dow Chemical Company, the Marines, or the CIA as educational institutions” or organizations dedicated to the search for truth. Mayor John Lindsay questioned whether the university had the right to be called "a special public institution, detached from worldly self-interest, if it speculates in real estate and helps develop and evaluate projects for the army fighting in the Vietnam War" (The Week in Review // New York Times 1969. May 4). Statements that the university is the “brain of society” or the brain of power structures are dangerous arrogant nonsense, if only because society is not an “organism” and certainly not brainless.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I wholeheartedly agree with Stephen Spender that it would be terribly stupid for students to destroy universities (even though they are the only ones who can actually do this for the simple reason that they have the numerical superiority, and therefore the real power), because campuses are this is not only their real, but also the only possible base. “Without the university there would be no students” ( Spender S. Op. cit. P. 22). But universities will remain a base for students only as long as they remain the only place in society where the government does not have a decisive voice, despite all the distortions and distortions of this principle. In the current situation, there is a danger that either the students or, in the case of Berkeley, the authorities will lose their heads; if this happens, the young rebels will simply weave an extra thread into what has been rightly called the “pattern of disaster” (Professor Richard E. Faulk of Princeton).

There is nothing more important than a strictly observed detachment from military-oriented research and all related projects; but it would be naive to hope that such aloofness would change the nature of modern science or hinder the war effort, and equally naive would be to deny that the restrictions to which such aloofness would lead may well have the effect of lowering university standards 26
The continuous flow of basic research from universities to industrial laboratories is significant and supports our thesis.

The only consequence that such a withdrawal would most likely not have would be a complete cessation of federal funding; because, as MIT's Jerome Lettwin recently noted, "the government can't afford not to fund us." 27
Ibid.

Nor can universities afford to forgo federal funding; but this simply means that universities "must learn to filter financial support" (Henry Steele Commager - a difficult but not impossible task in light of the enormous increase in the power of universities in modern society.) In short, the apparently irresistible spread of technology and machinery is not just threatening unemployment for some classes - it threatens the existence of entire countries and, perhaps, all of humanity.

It is quite natural that the new generation is more acutely aware of the possibility of the end of the world than those “over thirty,” not because they are younger, but because [the awareness of this possibility] became the first formative experience for this generation. (What are just “problems” for us is “built into the flesh and blood of youth” 28
Spender S. The Year of the Young Rebels. New York, 1969. P. 179.

.) If you ask a representative of this generation two simple questions: “What would you like to see the world like in fifty years?” and “Where would you like your life to be in five years?” - answers will most often begin with reservations: “provided that the world still exists” and “provided that I am still alive.” In the words of George Wald, “We are faced with a generation that is not at all sure that it has a future.” 29
New Yorker. 1969. March 22.

Because the future, as Spender says, is “a time bomb hidden in the present.” To the frequently asked question “who are they, the people of the new generation?” - I want to answer: “those who hear the ticking of this mechanism.” And to another question: “Who is rejecting this generation?” - one could answer: “those who do not see or refuse to see things as they are.”

Student rebellion is a global phenomenon, but its manifestations, of course, vary greatly from country to country, and often from university to university. This is especially true regarding the practice of violence. Violence remains for the most part a purely theoretical and rhetorical issue where the clash of generations is not accompanied by a clash of tangible interest groups. As is known, just such a clash of interest groups took place in Germany, where full-time teachers were interested in the excess of students at lectures and seminars. In America, the student movement carried out essentially nonviolent demonstrations - occupations of office buildings, sit-ins, and so on - and became seriously radical only in response to police intervention and brutality. It was only with the arrival of the Black Power movement on campuses that serious violence emerged. Black students, most of whom were not admitted on academic merit, represented and organized themselves as an interest group, namely as representatives of the black community. Their interests lay in lowering academic standards. They were more cautious than the white rioters, but from the very beginning (even before the incidents at Cornell University and the City College of New York) it was clear that for them violence was not a theoretical or rhetorical issue. Moreover, while student rebellion in Western countries nowhere can count on popular support outside the universities and, as a rule, faces open hostility as soon as it resorts to violent means, then behind the verbal or actual violence of black students is a large minority of the black community 30
Fred M. Hachinger, in the article “Campus Crisis,” writes: “Because the demands of black students are usually substantively just, they are treated with sympathy” (The Week in Review // New York Times. 1969. May 4). It seems characteristic of modern attitudes to these issues that James Forman’s “Manifesto Addressed to the White Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues in the United States and All Other Racist Institutions,” although publicly announced and distributed, was therefore certainly “news fit for publication.” ", remained unpublished until the New York Review of Books (1969. July 10) printed it (omitting the "Introduction"). Of course, its contents are semi-illiterate fantasies, hardly expressed seriously. However, this is not just a joke, and it is no secret that today the black community willingly indulges in such fantasies. It is understandable that the authorities are scared. But one cannot understand or forgive the authorities’ lack of imagination. Is it not obvious that if Mr. Foreman and his supporters do not meet with any opposition in the wider community, and even more so if they are appeased with small payments, then they will have to actually embark on a program in which they themselves may never have believed.

Indeed, black violence can be understood by analogy with the union violence that occurred in America one generation earlier; and although, as far as I know, only Stoughton Lynd drew an explicit analogy between trade union riots and student revolts 31
In a letter to the New York Times (1969. April 9), Lind mentions only "nonviolent protest actions such as strikes and sit-ins," deliberately leaving aside the violent working class riots of the 1920s, and asks why "these tactics , which has remained acceptable for a generation in union-management relations, is rejected when used by students on campuses? When a trade unionist is expelled from a factory council, his comrades stop working until the conflict is resolved.” It appears that Lind has adopted a university image (unfortunately not uncommon among trustees and administrators) in which the campus is owned by a board of trustees who hire the administration to manage its properties, and the administration in turn employs faculty as employees to serve its clients, i.e. students. This “image” does not correspond to any reality. No matter how intense the conflicts in the academic world have become, we are not talking about a clash of interests or a class struggle.

It seems that the university authorities, with their strange tendency to give in to Negro demands, even frankly stupid and outrageous ones, 32
Bayard Rustin, a leader of the Negro civil rights movement, said all that was required on the issue: college officials must “stop capitulating to the foolish demands of the Negro students”; it is wrong if “the guilt and masochism of one group allows another part of society to resort to weapons in the name of justice”; black students are “suffering from integration shock” and looking for “an easy way out of their problems”; in fact, what Negro students need is not “spiritual development courses,” but “remedial instruction” that would help them “do mathematics and write without errors” (quoted in: Daily News. 1969. April 28). How much it says about the moral and intellectual state of society that it took real courage to express such simple truths on these issues! Even more frightening is the likely prospect that in five or ten years the “education” of teaching Swahili (a 19th-century quasi-language spoken by Arab caravans carrying ivory and slaves, a hybrid mixture of a Bantu dialect with a huge number of Arabic loanwords) ; see: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1969. s.v.), African literature and other non-existent subjects will be interpreted as another ploy by which white people prevent the Negroes from receiving an adequate education.

The selfless and usually highly moral demands of white rebels also think in these terms and feel more comfortable when confronted with interests accompanied by violence than when it comes to nonviolent “participatory democracy.” The acquiescence of university authorities to black demands is often attributed to the "guilt" of the white community; I think a more likely explanation is that faculty, boards of trustees, and administrators all half-consciously agree with the obvious truth from the official Report on Violence in America: “Force and violence are more likely to be successful techniques of social control and indoctrination when they have broad popular support behind them.” 33
See the report of the National Commission to Investigate and Prevent Violence (New York Times. 1969. June 6).

The new - undeniable - cult of violence in the student movement has a remarkable feature. While the rhetoric of the new activists is clearly inspired by Fanon, their theoretical arguments usually contain nothing more than a mishmash of various Marxist leftovers. And this cannot but amaze anyone who has ever read Marx or Engels. Who can call an ideology Marxist that pins its hopes on “classless slackers,” believes that “in the lumpen proletariat, rebellion will find its urban vanguard,” and hopes that “gangsters will illuminate the path for the people”? 34
Fanon F. Op. cit. P. 69, 129, 130.

Sartre, with his usual felicity of words, found a formula for this new faith. “Violence,” he now believes, relying on Fanon’s book, “like the spear of Achilles, can heal wounds inflicted by it.” If this were true, revenge would be a panacea for most of our ills. This myth is more abstract and further removed from reality than Sorel's myth of the general strike. It is worthy of the worst rhetorical excesses of Fanon himself - such as “hunger with dignity is better than bread in slavery.” To refute this statement, neither history nor theory is required: its falsity is obvious to the most superficial observer of the processes taking place in the human body. But if Fanon had said that bread with dignity is better than cake in slavery, then the rhetorical pointe would be lost.

When you read irresponsible, bombastic statements of this kind (and the ones I have quoted are quite indicative, minus the fact that Fanon manages to maintain contact with reality better than most similar authors) and consider them in the light of what we know about the history of riots and revolutions, you want not to attach significance to them and to explain them by a passing state of mind or by the ignorance and noble feelings of people who were faced with unprecedented events and innovations without the means to comprehend them, and therefore resurrect those thoughts and feelings from which Marx hoped to rid the revolution once and for all. Who ever doubted that victims of violence dream of violence, that the oppressed dream of the day when they themselves will find themselves in the place of the oppressors, that the poor dream of the riches of the rich, that the persecuted dream of changing “the role of the game to the role of the hunter ”, and that the latter dream of a kingdom where “the last will be first, and the first will be last”? 35
Fanon F. Op. cit. P. 37ff., 53.

The fact of the matter, as Marx realized, is that these dreams never come true 36
James Forman's manifesto to churches and synagogues (endorsed by the National Black Economic Development Conference), which I mentioned above and which he said was "only the beginning of the reparations due to us as a people who have been exploited, humiliated, abused, killed and persecuted ” reads like a classic example of this kind of idle daydreaming. According to Forman, “It follows from the laws of revolution that the most oppressed will make a revolution, the ultimate object of which is that we shall obtain the leadership and complete control of all that is in the United States. Gone are the days when we obeyed and the white boy led.” This reversal of roles can be achieved by “using all necessary means, including the use of force and the power of arms, to overthrow the colonizer.” And when he, on behalf of the black community (which, of course, does not support him) “declares war,” refuses to “share power with the whites,” and demands that “the white people in this country agree to recognize the leadership role of blacks,” he is at the same time calls on "all Christians and Jews to practice patience, tolerance, understanding and non-violence" during the entire period until the black takeover, "even if it is a thousand years from now."

The rarity of slave revolts and uprisings of the dispossessed and trampled upon is well known; in the few cases when they did occur, it was precisely that “mad rage” that turned these dreams into a universal nightmare. And never, as far as I know, was the force of these “volcanic” explosions, as Sartre thinks, “equal to the pressure exerted on them.” To identify movements of national liberation with such explosions is to predict their collapse, not to mention the fact that their unlikely victory would lead to a change not of the world or the system, but only of a change of faces. Finally, to believe that there is such a thing as “Third World unity” to which the new cry of the decolonization era can be addressed: “People of all undeveloped countries, unite!” (Sartre) means reproducing Marx’s worst illusions on a colossally enlarged scale and with much less justification. The Third World is not a reality, but an ideology 37
Students, caught between two superpowers and equally disillusioned by East and West, “inevitably get carried away by some third ideology - from Mao Zedong’s China to Fidel Castro’s Cuba” ( Spender S. Op. cit. P. 92). Their appeals to Mao, Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh are like pseudo-religious incantations addressed to saviors from another world; they would have prayed to Tito if Yugoslavia had been more remote and inaccessible. Not so with the Black Power movement; his ideological commitment to the non-existent “third world unity” is not just romantic nonsense. They are obviously interested in the black/white dichotomy; but this, of course, is pure escapism - an escape into a dream world in which blacks will make up the overwhelming majority of the world population.

Hannah Arendt's book is divided into three parts - it is reasonable to divide the review into these parts.

False windows of power

False windows are a well-known architectural element that does not violate the harmony of the palace, but only shows that true power, with its grace, turns even emptiness and nothingness into a meaningful element of the composition. False windows “in the black sky” require some kind of pretense from the viewer - he must accept them as true, while recognizing them as false. They will then not only be accepted as true, but will become a true aesthetic fact, the same heritage as any other element. Power for Hannah Arendt is a complex baroque or empire composition; it is not a nomenclature, not a system of subordination and management, but rather a collection of all kinds of architectural elements, each of which is absurd when taken separately, but together they form a composition that does not tolerate emptiness.

If in ancient metaphysics nature did not tolerate a vacuum, then in the metaphysics of Hannah Arendt politics does not tolerate a vacuum; and does not forgive that emptiness, that frustration, which leads to violence. Arendt was skeptical about the youth violence of 1968, which served as the backdrop for the book. For her, this youth violence was simply an indicator of the frustration of those people who have learned to list all the architectural elements, to put parliament, court and local government on the shelves of their minds, but who are at the same time irritated by this curiosity.

New Publishing House

Hannah Arendt rather acts as an Enlightenment naturalist, for whom the systematization of curiosities and pathologies in nature did not prove the strangeness of natural life, but, on the contrary, admired the classical harmony of the genera and species of organisms. Systematization, accompanied by a lot of work to explain individual phenomena, created the ideal of classical harmony as a single principle of “spiritual existence” - the distance between the Enlightenment and the glorification of the spirit is not as great as it seems at first glance. Parliament, as the bearer of the spirit of democracy, with signs with the names of each speaker, is structured in the same way as a botanical garden, a zoo or a mineral collection: just as every phenomenon must speak out by being included in a catalogue, so every parliamentarian must speak out by creating a draft law. Arendt shows that it is possible to get rid of violence in modern politics if the Enlightenment is returned to it not as an ideology, but as the transformation of a “botanical garden” into a “seedling nursery.”

Hannah Arendt immediately separates power and violence, proving with the help of numerous calculations that strong power does not resort to violence. Violence is always a temporary measure, always revenge or rage, which is in no way compatible with the dignity of power. Power cannot count on any fierce adherents who obey the orders of the commander or the dictates of the heart: no matter how strong the effects of these orders from without and internal motivations, Goliath is doomed to fall under the weight of the architecture of its volumes. “The amount of violence at the disposal of a particular country may soon no longer be a reliable indicator of that country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a significantly smaller and weaker power. And here there is an ominous similarity with one of the oldest intuitions of political science - that power (power) it cannot be measured in terms of wealth, that the abundance of wealth can weaken power, that the rich are especially dangerous for the power and well-being of republics” (p. 16). Power, understood as wealth, demands that real windows be cut in place of all the false windows, but this is precisely what turns out to be a fatal decision: the building becomes uninhabitable, uncomfortable to the point of incompatibility with life. And then it is not violence that rises up against her, but living life.

Temptation: leading and elevating

For Arendt, the world of people living in a democracy is a world of people seduced by well-formed speech. Recalling how small the activists were in the student riots, Arendt notes: “The inactively observing majority, amused by the skirmish between professor and student, has in fact already become a secret ally of the minority. (You just have to try to imagine what would have happened if one or more unarmed Jews in Germany on the eve of Hitler had tried to disrupt the lecture of an anti-Semitic professor...)” (p. 50). At a superficial glance, it might seem that Arendt distrusts the rebellious minority, although he endlessly elevates it above the general compromise in the Nazi state. But in fact, the unity of thought of the Aryan students in Germany and the unity of thought of the democratic students in America are different things.

The Aryan students considered themselves philosophers who would never be seduced by anyone's living speech: they know better how to do it. Whereas American students are rhetoricians who understand that in a dispute between life and an idea, life wins. On the side of life is not only the scope of possibilities, but also the fact that life’s plan for itself is immediately clear. So the sage Gorgias, justifying Helen of Troy, said that she was seduced not only by the compliments of Paris, but also by the fire of Eros, which makes all people tremble and leaves no one indifferent to the happiness and misfortune of others. Totalitarianism requires being indifferent, but here we can remember not only Gorgias, but also Cicero, who, discussing the nature of the gods, noted that the gods cannot be considered indifferent - after all, if they have sufficient invisible eloquence to convince even skeptics of their existence, then they are sensitive to the world, just as a rhetorician is sensitive to the slightest change in the mood of the audience. For Cicero, the world, and not just man and society, has a mood; and therefore politics for Cicero is not the realization of “interests” and moods, but the ability to live in the world so that it does not chatter you, talk you over, or confuse you.

Thanks to Arendt, the world learned that hatred of those who are not like you is hatred of life, nothing more and nothing less. Now many Russian readers will know about this.

Hannah Arendt does not refer to either Gorgias or Cicero - such references to ancient rhetoric will become common only in modern thought, with Barbara Cassin and her school. But she continues the theme that was once opened by another great woman philosopher, Simone Weil, who called the Iliad “a poem about power.” Strength here was not called violence, but the effort to be with another, to bear the cross of another, like a wounded person on the shoulders. For Weil, the Iliad was a real prologue to the New Testament, a real explanation of what it means to take up a cross: it is to treat another as a wounded person, to take on the full weight of his biography.

Hannah Arendt's merit is that she connected this bearing of the cross with the bearing of temptation, with the ability to be seduced by someone else's speech and seduced by the beauty of one's own life. The establishment of a political order for her is a temptation: the ability of the people to perceive the constitution as something that brings everyone into awe, into a sacred expectation of a better life, and thereby become a political people, seduced by the eros of order. This is the exact opposite of the temptation of authoritarianism and totalitarianism - the rejection of the cross. “Ideology” is a way to contemplate order, serve it faithfully and commit crimes along this path, bypassing the cross, which can only give the right to contemplate order.

Being non-animal

The most important part of European culture was the fabled attitude towards animals as images of human passions. But it was not psychological insight that made them so, but simply the spirit of exaggeration inherent in myth: myth is ready to turn any rage into cosmic rage. Then, as Arendt also writes, war will simply be the materialization of an image of animal rage rooted in the deepest antiquity of humanity. But it is precisely this simple transition from magnitude to magnitude that Arendt argues with. She insists that no explanation, no tricks of speech will turn animal passion into military rage. “None of the properties of creativity can be adequately expressed in metaphors borrowed from the life process” (p. 96). Metaphors that are simply and unpretentiously borrowed are for Arendt a grave philological sin.

She contrasts this philological sin with philological virtue. Without saying anything about the plots of ancient literature, in its image of the social world it follows not ancient, but enlightened classical mythology, suitable for the moral education of schoolchildren. The animal turns out to be not a character in fables, but a character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: if the poet sings of the transformation of forms, then an animal body can hide behind a human face and vice versa. If in a fable conformity transforms precisely one behavior and not another, then “Metamorphoses,” on the contrary, means a complex disguise of behavior, an unexpected write-off of rage and other instincts, which are then reproduced as simple imitation. It is no longer a person who carries animal rage within himself, but society, masking the animal nature within itself, suddenly finds itself engulfed in collective rage. The need for disassociation when taking on a new form, liberation from old habits then requires one to reproduce old habits in order to recognize oneself already in a transformed body - in the body of social life.

Hannah Arendt unexpectedly turns out to be a critic of the widespread “personalist” ideas that a meeting with the Other awakens in a person his deepest thought about himself, strikes in him a spark of true self-knowledge and true humanity. This romantic myth no longer worked. On the contrary, for Arendt, the encounter with the Other allows a person not to pretend, not to discipline himself and awakens in people a truly inexplicable cruelty. All prudence in social life disappears when a person forgets that he must be able to turn into a “political animal,” according to Aristotle.

“Political animal” is not just a designation of certain skills, habits of life in society, but a designation of a person’s ability to renounce his own givenness, racial or class, and perceive politics as a new life for himself. Racism, totalitarianism and various forms of rationalized violence for Arendt are forms of evasion of metamorphosis, evasion of life, this is a reduction of reality exclusively to quantitative measurements and comparisons: is there enough food for everyone and is there enough rage in the collective to destroy resisting individuals. And only living life becomes true politics, that way of life that is unpredictable enough for a person to find his place, and predictable enough so that he does not abuse violence again. Of course, such a genuine politics is still a utopia, but thanks to Arendt, as thanks to Derrida or Habermas, the world has learned that hatred of those who are not like you is hatred of life, no more and no less. Now many Russian readers will know about this.

The publication of the book itself is a tribute to the memory of the translator, Grigory Dashevsky. The classical education of the finest connoisseur of ancient poetry and rhetoric turned the translation into a real panorama of the political life of various centuries: if Dashevsky translated “there is a firm conviction behind this,” then the conviction really turned out to be a monument, like monuments to generals and kings - convictions, like kings, once ruled the world; and if it is said “verbal nuances play, at best, a secondary role,” then this means not just the insignificance of semantic overtones, but the significance of the playful principle in politics, which arises where words become too polysemantic. The text of Arendt's book is literally acted out by a virtuoso translator; one might say, we see not just a virtuoso playing, but also a change of draperies, a change of scenery, and we come to a better understanding of entire eras in the history of European culture. We would not have found the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the age of totalitarian utopias in such a new way if it were not for these imaginary scenery created by the thoughtful and classically measured use of each word in translation.

Hannah Arendt. About violence / Transl. from English Grigory Dashevsky. - M.: New publishing house, 2014. - 148 p.

The New Publishing House has published a translation of the treatise by the great political philosopher Hannah Arendt “On Violence”, in which she questions the political theories popular in the 20th century about the coincidence of the concepts of power and violence. The immediate reason for writing the book was the student unrest that swept through Western countries in the late 1960s.

Arendt argues primarily with leftist philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, who, in her opinion, distorted the teachings of Karl Marx, who recommended resorting to violence only in the most extreme situations. But this dispute becomes only a pretext for the assertion that in the “age of wars and revolutions” power and the struggle for it were finally replaced by crude and direct violence of all against all.

"Russian Planet" with permission "New Publishing House" publishes an excerpt from Hannah Arendt's book On Violence.

The more dubious and unreliable violence becomes in international relations, the more prestige and attractiveness it acquires in domestic affairs, especially in the matter of revolution. The intense Marxist rhetoric of the New Left coincides with the steady rise of the entirely un-Marxist faith promulgated by Mao Zedong - the belief that "power grows from the barrel of a rifle."

Of course, Marx was aware of the role of violence in history, but for him this role was secondary; It was not violence, but contradictions within the old society that led this society to destruction. Outbreaks of violence preceded the emergence of a new society, but were not its cause, and Marx compared these outbreaks to the birth pangs that precede the event of birth, but of course do not cause it. He viewed the state in the same spirit - it is an instrument of violence in the service of the ruling class, but the real power of the ruling class does not lie in violence and is not based on violence. It is determined by the role that this ruling class plays in society, or, more precisely, by its role in the process of production.

Cover of Hannah Arendt's book On Violence

It has often been (sometimes lamentably) noted that, under the influence of Marx's teachings, the revolutionary left movement renounced the use of violent means. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” openly repressive in Marx’s texts, was supposed to come only after the revolution and, like the Roman dictatorship, was designed for a strictly limited period. Political assassinations, with the exception of a few acts of individual terror carried out by small groups of anarchists, were the preserve of the right, while organized armed uprisings remained a specialty of the military. The left was convinced “that all sorts of conspiracies are not only useless, but also harmful. They know very well that revolutions cannot be made deliberately and arbitrarily, and that revolutions have always and everywhere been a necessary consequence of circumstances that were completely independent of the will and leadership of individual parties and entire classes.”

True, in the field of theory there were several exceptions. Georges Sorel, who at the beginning of the century attempted to combine Marxism with Bergson's philosophy of life (the result, although at a much lower level of intellectual sophistication, is strangely reminiscent of Sartre's current fusion of existentialism and Marxism), thought about class struggle in military terms; However, in the end he did not propose anything more violent than the famous myth of the general strike - today this form of action we would think of as belonging to the arsenal of nonviolent politics. But 50 years ago, even this modest proposal earned him a reputation as a fascist, despite his enthusiastic approval of Lenin and the Russian Revolution.

Sartre, who in the preface to Fanon's Curses goes much further in glorifying violence than Sorel in his famous Meditations on Violence, and further than Fanon himself, whose thesis Sartre wants to bring to its logical conclusion, still speaks of "Fascist statements of Sorel". This shows the extent to which Sartre is unaware of his fundamental divergence from Marx on the issue of violence, especially when he argues that “uncontrollable violence... is man re-creating himself”, that through “mad rage” “the damned” can “ become people." This opinion is all the more remarkable since the very idea of ​​man creating himself strictly belongs to the tradition of Hegelian and Marxist thought; this is the very foundation of all left-wing humanism.

But, according to Hegel, man “produces” himself through thinking, while for Marx, who turned Hegel’s “idealism” upside down, this function is performed by labor - the human form of metabolism with nature. And although it could be argued that all ideas about man creating himself are united by a rebellion against the very facticity of human destiny (nothing is more obvious than that man, as a member of a species or an individual, does not owe his existence to himself) and that Therefore, what unites Sartre, Marx and Hegel is more essential than the [difference] of those concrete activities through which this non-fact [man's creation of himself] is supposed to happen, yet it cannot be denied that such essentially peaceful activities, like thinking and work, a real abyss separates from any acts of violence. “To shoot a European is to catch two birds with one stone... in the end you are left with a dead man and a free man,” says Sartre in the preface. Marx would never have written such a phrase.

Franz Fanon. Photo: hilobrow.com

I have quoted Sartre to show that this new turn to violence in the thinking of revolutionaries can go unnoticed even by one of their most revealing and intelligible representatives, and this is all the more remarkable since we are obviously not talking about operations with an abstract concept located in conducting the history of ideas. (Turning the “idealistic” idea around ( concept) thinking, one can come to a materialistic idea ( concept) labor; but it is impossible to arrive at the concept of violence).

Undoubtedly, this turn has its own logic, but it stems from experience, and this experience was completely unknown to any of the previous generations.

…Student rebellion is a global phenomenon, but its manifestations, of course, vary greatly from country to country, and often from university to university. This is especially true regarding the practice of violence. Violence remains for the most part a purely theoretical and rhetorical issue where the clash of generations is not accompanied by a clash of tangible interest groups. As is known, just such a clash of interest groups took place in Germany, where full-time teachers were interested in the excess of students at lectures and seminars. In America, the student movement carried out essentially nonviolent demonstrations - occupations of office buildings, sit-ins, and so on - and became seriously radical only in response to police intervention and brutality.

It was only with the arrival of the Black Power movement on campuses that serious violence emerged. Black students, most of whom were not admitted on academic merit, represented and organized themselves as an interest group, namely as representatives of the black community. Their interests lay in lowering academic standards. They were more cautious than the white rioters, but from the very beginning (even before the incidents at Cornell University and the City College of New York) it was clear that for them violence was not a theoretical or rhetorical issue. Moreover, while student rebellion in Western countries nowhere can count on popular support outside the universities and usually faces open hostility as soon as it resorts to violent means, a large minority of the black community is behind the verbal or actual violence of black students.

Indeed, black violence can be understood by analogy with the union violence that occurred in America one generation earlier; and although, to my knowledge, only Stoughton Lynd has drawn an explicit analogy between union riots and student revolts, it seems that the university authorities - with their strange tendency to yield to the demands of the Negroes, even frankly stupid and outrageous, rather than to the disinterested and usually highly moral demands of the white rioters, - also think in these categories and feel more comfortable when faced with interests accompanied by violence than when it comes to non-violent “participatory democracy”.

The acquiescence of university authorities to black demands is often attributed to the "guilt" of the white community; I think a more likely explanation is that faculty, boards of trustees, and administrators all half-consciously agree with the obvious truth from the official Report on Violence in America: “Force and violence are more likely to be successful techniques of social control and indoctrination when they have broad popular support behind them.”

The new - undeniable - cult of violence in the student movement has a remarkable feature. While the rhetoric of the new activists is clearly inspired by Fanon, their theoretical arguments usually contain nothing more than a mishmash of various Marxist leftovers. And this cannot but amaze anyone who has ever read Marx or Engels. Who can call an ideology Marxist that pins its hopes on “classless slackers,” believes that “in the lumpen proletariat, rebellion will find its urban vanguard,” and hopes that “gangsters will illuminate the path for the people”?

Sartre, with his usual felicity of words, found a formula for this new faith. “Violence,” he now believes, relying on Fanon’s book, “like the spear of Achilles, can heal wounds inflicted by it.” If this were true, revenge would be a panacea for most of our ills. This myth is more abstract and further removed from reality than Sorel's myth of the general strike. It is worthy of the worst rhetorical excesses of Fanon himself - such as "hunger with dignity is better than bread in slavery." To refute this statement, neither history nor theory is required: its falsehood is obvious to the most superficial observer of the processes taking place in the human body. But if he had said that bread with dignity is better than cake in slavery, then the rhetorical pointe would be lost.

When you read irresponsible, bombastic statements of this kind (and the ones I have quoted are quite indicative, minus the fact that Fanon manages to maintain contact with reality better than most similar authors) and consider them in the light of what we know about the history of riots and revolutions, you want not to attach significance to them and to explain them by a passing state of mind or by the ignorance and noble feelings of people who were faced with unprecedented events and innovations without the means to comprehend them, and therefore resurrect those thoughts and feelings from which Marx hoped to rid the revolution once and for all.

Who ever doubted that victims of violence dream of violence, that the oppressed dream of the day when they themselves will find themselves in the place of the oppressors, that the poor dream of the riches of the rich, that the persecuted dream of changing “the role of the game to the role of the hunter ”, and that the latter dream of a kingdom where “the last will be first, and the first will be last”? The fact of the matter, as Marx realized, is that these dreams never come true. The rarity of slave revolts and uprisings of the dispossessed and trampled upon is well known; in the few cases when they did occur, it was precisely that “mad rage” that turned these dreams into a universal nightmare. And never, as far as I know, was the force of these “volcanic” explosions, as Sartre thinks, “equal to the pressure exerted on them.”

To identify movements of national liberation with such explosions is to predict their collapse, not to mention the fact that their unlikely victory would lead to a change not of the world or the system, but only of a change of persons. Finally, to believe that there is such a thing as “Third World unity” to which the new cry of the decolonization era can be addressed: “Inhabitants of all undeveloped countries, unite! "(Sartre) means reproducing Marx's worst illusions on a colossally enlarged scale and with much less justification. The Third World is not a reality, but an ideology.

Arendt H. On violence - M.: New publishing house, 2014

Published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

© 1969, 1970 by Hannah Arendt

© New publishing house, 2014

To my friend Mary

Chapter first

The reason for these reflections were the events and discussions of the last few years, considered in the context of the entire 20th century, which indeed turned out, as Lenin predicted, to be a century of wars and revolutions, and therefore a century of violence, which is considered to be their common denominator. In the current situation, however, there is another factor which, although not predicted by anyone, is at least as important. The technical evolution of instruments of violence has now reached such a stage that it is no longer possible to imagine any political purpose that would correspond to their destructive potential or justify their practical use in armed conflict. Therefore, war - since time immemorial the ruthless supreme arbiter of international disputes - has lost much of its effectiveness and almost all of its luster. The “apocalyptic” chess game between the superpowers, that is, between states operating at the highest stage of development of our civilization, is played in accordance with the rule “whoever wins, the end of both” 1
Wheeler H. The Strategic Calculators // Calder N. Unless Peace Comes. New York: Viking, 1968. P. 109.

; it is a game devoid of any resemblance to any previous war games. Its “rational” goal is deterrence, not victory, and since the arms race is no longer a preparation for war, it can now be justified only on the basis that the greatest deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. The question of how we will ever extricate ourselves from the obvious madness of this situation remains unanswered.

Because violence, unlike power ( power), strength ( force) or power ( strength) – always needs guns(as Engels pointed out long ago 2
Engels F. Herrn Eugen Duhrings Umwalzung der Wissenschaft. Part II, ch. 3 [ Engels F. Anti-Dühring: The revolution in science carried out by Mr. Eugene Dühring // Marx K., Engels F. Collected Works: In 50 volumes. M., 1961. T. 20. pp. 170–178].

), then the technological revolution, the revolution in the manufacture of tools, was especially noticeable in military affairs.

The very essence of violent action is governed by the category “means-end,” and in relation to human affairs, the main property of this category is the risk that the goal will be subordinated to the means that it justifies and that are required to achieve it. And since the final end of human action, unlike the final product of production, is not reliably foreseeable, the means used to achieve political ends usually have a greater influence on the future of the world than the intended ends.

The results of any human actions are not subject to the control of the actors, but violence also contains an additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortune, that is, good or bad luck, play such a fateful role in human affairs as on the battlefield, and this invasion of the unexpected will not disappear if it is called a “chance event” and considered doubtful from a scientific point of view; just as it cannot be eliminated with the help of modeling, [developing] scenarios, game theory, etc. In such matters there is no certainty, not even the final certainty of mutual destruction under such and such calculated conditions. The very fact that those who perfect the means of destruction have finally reached such a level of technical development where, thanks to the means at their disposal, their very goal, namely war, is on the verge of complete extinction 3
As General André Beaufre points out in Battlefields in the 1980s, only “in parts of the world not yet covered by nuclear deterrence” is war still possible, and even this “conventional war,” despite its horrors, is already effectively limited by a constant threat escalation into nuclear war (quoted from: Calder N. Op. cit. P. 3).

, - this very fact serves as an ironic reminder of the omnipresent unpredictability that we face as soon as we approach the sphere of violence. The main reason why war has not yet left us is not the secret desire for death inherent in the human species, not the indomitable instinct of aggression, not (the last and more plausible answer) the serious economic and social dangers associated with disarmament 4
"Report from Iron Mountain" (New York, 1967) - a satire on the way of thinking of the RAND Corporation and other think tanks ( think tanks); her “timid attempt to look beyond the edges of peacetime” is perhaps closer to reality than most “serious” studies. Its main thesis - that war is so fundamental to the functioning of our society that we will not risk abolishing it unless we find even more murderous ways to solve our problems - is shocking only to those who have forgotten that the unemployment crisis of the Great Depression was solved only with the outbreak of the Second World War, or those who find it more convenient to ignore or downplay the scale of modern hidden unemployment.

And the simple fact is that there is still no replacement for this final arbiter in international affairs on the political stage. Wasn't Hobbes right when he said: “Treaties without the sword are mere words?”

And it is unlikely that such a replacement will appear as long as national independence, that is, freedom from foreign domination, is identified ( rule), and state sovereignty, i.e. a claim to unrestrained and unlimited power ( power) in international affairs. (The United States is one of the few countries where a proper division of independence and sovereignty is possible, at least in theory, so long as such a division would not threaten the very foundations of the American republic. According to the American Constitution, international treaties form an integral part of federal law and - as noted in 1793 Judge James Wilson - "the concept of sovereignty is completely unknown to the United States Constitution." But the days of such sober and proud detachment from the traditional language and conceptual political scheme of the European nation-state are long gone; the legacy of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better or worse, has become the heir Europe, as if inheriting its ancestral heritage, unaware, alas, of the fact that the decline of European power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of the national state and its concept of sovereignty.) That the war still remains ultima ratio[the latter argument], the continuation of a policy of violent means in relations between undeveloped countries, cannot serve as an argument against its obsolescence, and there cannot be any consolation in the fact that only small countries without nuclear and biological weapons can still afford to fight. It's no secret that the notorious "random event" [that would trigger a nuclear war] is most likely to occur in those parts of the planet where the ancient maxim "victory has no alternative" is still close to the truth.

Under such circumstances, there are indeed few things more fearful than the steadily growing authority of science-oriented experts in government deliberations in recent decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they don’t think. Instead of doing this old-fashioned non-computerized activity, they calculate the consequences of certain hypothetically possible configurations, however, without being able to test their hypotheses against real facts. The logical flaw in these hypothetical future scenarios is always the same: what initially appears as a hypothesis - with or without implied alternatives, depending on the degree of sophistication of the scenario - instantly, usually after a few paragraphs, turns into a "fact" that then it generates a whole chain of the same non-facts, and as a result, the purely speculative nature of the entire construction is forgotten. Needless to say, this is not science, but pseudoscience - or, to use Noam Chomsky's definition, "a desperate attempt by the social and behavioral sciences to imitate the appearance of sciences that actually have significant intellectual content." And (as Richard N. Goodwin recently pointed out in a review article that had the rare quality of revealing the “unconscious humor” characteristic of many bombastic pseudoscientific theories) the most obvious and “most profound objection to this brand of strategic theory is not its lack of usefulness, but its danger is that it can convince us that we have an understanding of events and control over their course, which we actually do not have.” 5
Quote By: Chomsky N. American Power and the New Mandarines. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969; Goodwin R. Review of Thomas C. Schelling “Arms and Influence” (Yale, 1966) // The New Yorker. 1968. February 17.

Events are, by definition, such occurrences ( occurrences) that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; Only in a world where nothing significant ever happens can the visions of futurists come true. Predictions of the future are always just projections of current automatic processes and procedures, that is, of those incidents that are supposed to happen if people do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident ( accident) inevitably destroy the entire scheme within which the prediction exists and within which it finds its data. (Fortunately, Proudhon's casual remark is still true:

“The fruitfulness of the unexpected far exceeds the foresight of the statesman.” It is even more obvious that it exceeds the expert’s calculations.) Name such unforeseen, unforeseen and unpredictable incidents ( happenings) "random events" ( random events) or “the last spasms of the past”, dooming them to insignificance or to the notorious “dustbin of history” - this is the most ancient technique of the predictive craft; This technique undoubtedly helps theoretical harmony, but only at the cost of further distance between theory and reality. The danger lies not only in the plausibility of these theories, since they actually take their data from recognizable current trends, but also in the fact that, due to their internal coherence, they have a hypnotic effect - they lull our common sense, which is nothing more than our mental an organ designed to perceive, understand, and interact with reality and factuality.

No one who has thought about history and politics can fail to recognize the enormous role that violence has always played in human affairs, and at first glance it is even surprising that violence has so rarely been made the subject of special consideration 6
Of course, there is a vast literature on wars and types of war, but it is about the instruments of violence, not about violence as such.

. (In the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, “violence” did not even deserve a separate entry.) This shows how violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore remained neglected; no one studies or questions what is obvious to everyone. Those who saw nothing but violence in human affairs and were convinced that they are “always accidental, frivolous, imprecise” (Renan) or that God is always on the side of large battalions, nothing beyond this is either about violence or about history they couldn't say. Anyone who looked for any meaning in the chronicles of the past was almost forced to consider violence as a marginal phenomenon. Whether it was Clausewitz who called war "the continuation of politics by other means" or Engels who called violence "an accelerator of economic development" 7
Engels F. Op. cit. Part II, ch.4 [ Engels F. Decree. op. pp. 179–189].

The emphasis was on political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded the act of violence. Therefore, scholars of international relations until recently took it as an axiom that “a military solution that does not correspond to the deep cultural sources of national power cannot be stable,” or that “whenever a country’s power structure contradicts its economic development,” political power fails with her means of violence 8
Wheeler H. The Strategic Calculators // Calder N. Op. cit. P. 107; Engels F. Op. cit.

Today, all these old truths about the relationship between war and politics, or about violence and power, have become inapplicable. What followed World War II was not peace, but the Cold War and the creation of the military-industrial-trade union complex. Today, much more plausible than the 19th-century formulas of Engels or Clausewitz are the words about “the priority of military potential as the main structuring force in society” or the assertion that “economic systems, political philosophies and legal systems serve and expand the military system, but not vice versa.” , or the conclusions that “war is itself a basic social system within which secondary modes of social organization conflict or cooperate.” Even more convincing than the simple inversion proposed by the anonymous author of the "Report from the Iron Mountain" - that it is no longer war that is "the continuation of diplomacy, or politics, or the achievement of economic goals," but peace is the continuation of war by other means - is even more convincing actual development of military technologies. According to the Russian physicist Sakharov, “thermonuclear war cannot be considered as a continuation of politics by military means (according to Clausewitz’s formula), but is a means of global suicide.” 9
Sakharov A. D. Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. New York, 1968. P. 36 [ Sakharov A. D. Reflections on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom // Sakharov A. D. Anxiety and hope. M., 2006. T. I. P. 77–78].

Moreover, we know that “a small quantity of arms can destroy in a few moments all other sources of national power.” 10
Wheeler H. Op. cit.

That biological weapons have already been invented, with the help of which “a small group of individuals ... can upset the strategic balance” and which are quite cheap and therefore can be produced in “countries that are not capable of developing nuclear strike forces” 11
Calder N. The New Weapons // Calder N. Op. cit. P. 239.

That “in a few years” robot soldiers will “completely replace human soldiers” 12
Thring M.W. Robots on the March // Ibid. P. 169.

And that, finally, in a conventional war, poor countries are much less vulnerable than great powers, precisely because they are “underdeveloped,” and because in guerrilla wars, technical superiority can “turn out to be a weak point rather than a strong point.” 13
Dedijer V. The Poor Man's Power // Ibid. P. 29.

Taken together, all these unpleasant innovations lead to a complete upheaval in the relationship between power and violence, foreshadowing a future upheaval in the relations between small and big powers. The amount of violence at the disposal of a particular country may soon no longer be a reliable indicator of that country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a significantly smaller and weaker power. And here there is an ominous similarity with one of the most ancient intuitions of political science - that power ( power) cannot be measured in terms of wealth, that the abundance of wealth can weaken power, that the rich are especially dangerous for the power and well-being of republics. Although this intuition was forgotten, it did not lose its significance, especially now that its truth has acquired additional significance, having also become applicable to the arsenal of violence.

The more dubious and unreliable violence becomes in international relations, the more prestige and attractiveness it acquires in domestic affairs, especially in the matter of revolution. The intense Marxist rhetoric of the New Left coincides with the steady rise of the entirely un-Marxist faith promulgated by Mao Zedong—the belief that “power grows from the barrel of a rifle.” Of course, Marx was aware of the role of violence in history, but for him this role was secondary; It was not violence, but contradictions within the old society that led this society to destruction. Outbreaks of violence preceded the emergence of a new society, but were not its cause, and Marx compared these outbreaks to the birth pangs that precede the event of birth, but of course do not cause it. He viewed the state in the same spirit - it is an instrument of violence in the service of the ruling class, but the real power of the ruling class does not lie in violence and is not based on violence. It is determined by the role that this ruling class plays in society, or, more precisely, by its role in the process of production.

It has often been (sometimes lamentably) noted that, under the influence of Marx's teachings, the revolutionary left movement renounced the use of violent means. The “dictatorship of the proletariat,” openly repressive in Marx’s texts, was supposed to come only after the revolution and, like the Roman dictatorship, was designed for a strictly limited period. Political assassinations, with the exception of a few acts of individual terror carried out by small groups of anarchists, were the preserve of the right, while organized armed uprisings remained a specialty of the military. The left was convinced “that all sorts of conspiracies are not only useless, but also harmful. They know very well that revolutions cannot be made deliberately and arbitrarily, and that revolutions have always and everywhere been a necessary consequence of circumstances that were completely independent of the will and leadership of individual parties and entire classes.” 14
I quote this early remark of Engels from an 1847 manuscript from: Barion J. Hegel und die marxistische Staatslehre. Bonn, 1963 [ Engels F. Principles of communism // Marx K., Engels F. Collected works: B 50 T. M., 1955. T.4. P.331].

True, in the field of theory there were several exceptions. Georges Sorel, who at the beginning of the century attempted to combine Marxism with Bergson's philosophy of life (the result, although at a much lower level of intellectual sophistication, is strangely reminiscent of Sartre's current fusion of existentialism and Marxism), thought about class struggle in military terms; however, he ultimately proposed nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike—a form of action we would today think of as belonging to the arsenal of nonviolent politics. But fifty years ago even this modest proposal earned him a reputation as a fascist, despite his enthusiastic approval of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Sartre, who in the preface to Fanon's Curses goes much further in glorifying violence than Sorel in his famous Meditations on Violence, and further than Fanon himself, whose thesis Sartre wants to bring to its logical conclusion, still speaks of "Fascist statements of Sorel". This shows the extent to which Sartre is unaware of his fundamental disagreement with Marx on the issue of violence, especially when he argues that “uncontrollable violence... is man re-creating himself,” that through “mad rage” those “marked with a curse” can “become men.” " This opinion is all the more remarkable since the very idea of ​​man creating himself strictly belongs to the tradition of Hegelian and Marxist thought; this is the very foundation of all left-wing humanism. But, according to Hegel, man “produces” himself through thinking 15
It is very significant that Hegel in this context speaks of Sichselbstproduzieren[self-production]: Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen ?ber die Geschichte der Philosophie / Hrsg. von J. Hoffmeister. Leipzig, 1938. P. 114 [ Hegel G. F. W. Lectures on the history of philosophy. St. Petersburg, 1994. Book. 2. P. 158].

Whereas for Marx, who turned Hegel’s “idealism” upside down, this function is performed by labor - the human form of metabolism with nature. And although it could be argued that all ideas about man creating himself are united by a rebellion against the very facticity of the human condition (nothing is more obvious than that man, as a member of a species or an individual, Not owes its existence to itself) and that therefore what unites Sartre, Marx and Hegel is more essential than the [difference] of those concrete activities through which this non-fact [man's creation of himself] is supposed to happen, yet cannot be denied, that such essentially peaceful activities as thinking and work are separated from any acts of violence by a real abyss. “To shoot a European is to catch two birds with one stone... in the end you are left with a dead man and a free man,” says Sartre in the preface. Marx would never have written such a phrase 16
Professor B. K. Parekh (University of Hull, England) kindly drew my attention to the following passage in the section on Feuerbach in The German Ideology (1846) (about this book Engels later wrote: “The completed part ... only proves how incomplete the time was our knowledge of economic history"): "Both for the mass generation of this communist consciousness, and for the achievement of the goal itself, a massive change of people is necessary ( des Menschen), which is only possible in practical movement, in the revolution; therefore, revolution is necessary not only because it is impossible to overthrow the ruling class in any other way, but also because overthrowing Only in revolution can a class throw off all the old abominations and become capable of creating a new basis for society” (quoted from the ed.: Marx K., Engels F. German Ideology/Ed. with an introduction by R. Pascal. New York, 1960. P. xv, 69 [ Marx K., Engels F. German ideology // Marx K., Engels F. Collected works: In 50 volumes. M., 1955. T. 3. P. 70]). Even in these, so to speak, pre-Marxist statements, the difference between the positions of Marx and Sartre is obvious. Marx speaks of the “mass change of men” and the “mass generation of communist consciousness,” rather than the liberation of the individual through an isolated act of violence (for the German text, see: Marx K., Engels F. Gesamtausgabe. I. Abteilung. Berlin, 1932. Vol. 5. S. 59 ff.).

I quoted Sartre to show that this new turn to violence in the thinking of revolutionaries can go unnoticed even by one of their most revealing and articulate representatives 17
The New Left's unconscious deviation from Marxism did not go unnoticed. See especially recent comments on the student movement by Leonardo Shapiro (New York Review of Books. 1968. December 5) and Raymond Aron ( Aaron R. La R?volution Introuvable. Paris: Fayard, 1968). Both see the reliance on violence as a throwback to either pre-Marxian utopian socialism (Aron) or the Russian anarchism of Nechaev and Bakunin (Shapiro), who “wrote much about the importance of violence as a factor of unity, as a cohesive force in a society or group, a hundred years before how these same ideas were expressed in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon.” Aron writes in the same vein: “The singers of the May revolution think that they have overcome Marxism... they have forgotten about a whole century of historical development” (p. 14). For a non-Marxist, reproach for such regression would hardly be a serious argument; but for Sartre, who, for example, writes: “The so-called “overcoming” of Marxism, at worst, can only be a return to pre-Marxist thinking, at best, the discovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy that is supposed to be overcome” ( Sartre J.–P. Question de Méthode // Sartre J.– P. Critique de la raison dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, i960. P. 17 [ Sartre J. – P. Problems of the method. M., 2008. P. 12]), this will be a very serious accusation. (It is noteworthy that Sartre and Aron, although political opponents, are in complete agreement on this point. This shows the extent to which Hegel's concept of history shapes the thinking of Marxists and non-Marxists alike.)
Sartre himself, in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, gives a Hegelian explanation for his resort to violence. His starting point is that "need and scarcity have determined the Manichaean basis of action and morality" in modern history, "the truth of which is based on scarcity and must manifest itself in the antagonism between classes." Aggression is a consequence of need in a world where “there is not enough for everyone.” In such conditions, violence ceases to be a marginal phenomenon. “Violence and counter-violence may be contingent, but they are contingent necessities, and the imperative consequence of any attempt to destroy this inhumanity will be that, by destroying the inhumanity of the anti-man in the enemy, I destroy the humanity of man in him and realize in myself his inhumanity. When I kill, torture, enslave, my goal is to suppress his freedom, that is, alien excessive force.” The model for a situation in which “everyone is redundant, redundant to the other” is a bus queue, the members of which apparently “not notice anything in each other except their place in the number line.” Sartre concludes: “They mutually deny any connection between each other’s inner worlds.” And from this it follows that practice is “the negation of otherness, which in itself is negation” - a very convenient conclusion, since the negation of negation is an affirmation.
The error in this reasoning seems obvious to me. There is a huge difference between “not noticing” and “denial”, between “denying any connection” with someone and “denying” his otherness; and for a person of sound mind there is a considerable distance from theoretical “denial” to murder, torture and enslavement.
Most of the quotes given are taken from: Laing R. D., Cooper D. G.. Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950–1960. London: Tavistock publications, 1964. Pt. 3. This seems acceptable to me, since Sartre says in the preface: “I have carefully read the work that you dedicated to me, and to my great pleasure I found here a very clear and correct outline of my thinking.”

And this is all the more remarkable since we are obviously not talking about operations with an abstract concept that is under the jurisdiction of the history of ideas. (Turning the “idealistic” idea around ( concept) thinking, one can come to a materialistic idea ( concept) labor; but it is impossible to arrive at the concept of violence.) Undoubtedly, this turn has its own logic, but it stems from experience, and this experience was completely unknown to any of the previous generations.

Pathos and ?lan[the impulse of] the new left, its sensibility, so to speak, is closely connected with the ominous suicidal development of modern weapons; this is the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the atomic bomb. From their parents' generation they inherited the experience of a massive invasion of criminal violence into politics: at school and at university they learned about concentration and death camps, about genocide and torture 18
Noam Chomsky correctly identifies among the motives for open rebellion the refusal to “take a place next to the ‘honest Germans’ whom we have all learned to despise” ( Chomsky N. Op. cit. P. 368).

About the mass military extermination of civilians, without which modern military operations are no longer possible, even if limited to “conventional” weapons. Their first reaction was an aversion to any form of violence, an almost automatic adherence to a policy of nonviolence. The very major successes of this movement, especially in the area of ​​civil rights, were followed by the protest movement against the Vietnam War, which remains an important factor in determining public opinion in this country [USA]. But it is by no means a secret that since then the situation has changed, that now the supporters of non-violence have gone on the defensive, and it would be idle talk to say that only “extremists” are engaged in the glorification of violence and only they have discovered (like Fanon’s Algerian peasants) that “only violence effective" 19
Fanon F. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
P. 61. I use this work because of its great influence on the current generation of students. However, Fanon himself is much more skeptical about violence than his admirers. It seems that the general reader has only read the first chapter of this book, “Concerning Violence.” Fanon is aware of the “undivided and total cruelty which, if not immediately suppressed, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks” (Ibid. P. 147).
Regarding the recent escalation of violence in the student movement, see the instructive series of articles "Gewalt" in the German weekly Der Spiegel (1969. February 10 ff); in the same magazine, see the series of articles “Mit dem Latein am Ende” (Ibid. 1969. No. 26–27).

The new militant activists were branded as anarchists, nihilists, red fascists, Nazis and (much more sensibly) “Luddites.” 20
They really form a motley mixture. Radical students easily mix with dropouts, hippies, drug addicts and psychopaths. The situation is further complicated by the fact that authorities fail to recognize the – often subtle – differences between crime and non-compliance, which are important differences. A sit-in and occupation of a building are not the same as arson or armed insurrection, and the difference is not purely quantitative. (Contrary to the opinion of one member of the Harvard Board of Trustees, a student takeover of a university building is not the same as a mob breaking into a First National Bank branch for the simple reason that the students are trespassing on property the use of which is, of course, regulated , but to which they themselves belong and which belongs to them just as much as the faculty and administration.) Even more alarming is the tendency of the faculty and administration to treat drug addicts and criminal elements (at the City College of New York and at Cornell University) much more leniently than to their own rebels.
Helmut Schelsky, a German sociologist, described back in 1961 ( Schelsky H. Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation. K?ln; Opladen, 1961) the possibility of “metaphysical nihilism,” by which he meant a radical social and spiritual negation of “the entire process of human scientific and technological reproduction,” i.e., a “no” said to “the emerging world of scientific civilization.” To call such a position nihilistic means to take the modern world as the only possible world. The protest of young rebels concerns precisely this point. Moreover, it would make perfect sense to blame the accusers themselves and say, as Sheldon Wallin and John Schaar did: “The major threat now is that the ruling and respectable classes seem ready to subscribe to the most nihilistic denial possible.” , that is, the denial of the future through the denial of one’s own children, the bearers of this future" ( Wolin Sh., Shaar J. Op. cit.).
Nathan Glaser, in the article “Student Power at Berkeley,” writes: “Student radicals... remind me more of the car-crashing Luddites than of the socialist unionists who sought full civil rights and power for workers.” Glazer N. Student Power in Berkeley//The Public Interest (special issue “The Universities”). 1968. Fall), and from this he concludes that Zbigniew Brzezinski (in an article about Columbia University: The New Republic. 1968. June I) is apparently right in his diagnosis: “Very often revolutions are the last convulsions of the past, and therefore, in fact, these are not revolutions, but counter-revolutions taking place under the name of revolutions.” Doesn't this passion for moving forward at any cost seem strange in two authors who are usually considered conservative? And doesn't it seem even more strange that Glaser does not recognize the crucial differences between the factory machines of early 19th century England and the technology of the mid 20th century, which turned out to be destructive even in its most beneficent guise - the discovery of nuclear energy, automation, medicine, the healing power of which led to to overpopulation, which in turn will almost certainly lead to mass starvation, air pollution, and so on?

And the students responded with equally meaningless labels - “police state” or “hidden fascism of late capitalism” and (much more reasonably) “consumer society” 21
The last of these epithets would make sense if it were understood descriptively (rather than evaluatively). However, behind it lies Marx’s illusory idea of ​​a society of free producers, of the liberation of productive social forces. In fact, such liberation is achieved not through revolutions, as Marx thought, but through science and technology. Moreover, this liberation was not accelerated, but seriously slowed down in all countries that experienced revolution. In other words, behind the student denunciation of consumption there is an idealization of production, and with it an archaic deification of productivity and creativity. “The joy of destruction is a creative joy” - this is indeed true if you believe that the “joy of work” is productive; destruction is almost the only remaining “work” that can be done with simple tools and without the help of machines, although machines would, of course, do this work much more efficiently.

The reason for their behavior was declared to be all kinds of social and psychological factors: an excess of connivance during their upbringing in America and an explosive reaction to excess authority in Germany and Japan, a lack of freedom in Eastern Europe and an excess of freedom in the West, a catastrophic lack of jobs for young sociologists in France and a superabundance of vacancies in almost every field of activity in the United States. All these factors seem quite convincing at the local level, but are clearly refuted by the fact that the student revolt is a global phenomenon. There can be no talk about the common social denominator of this movement, but it is impossible not to recognize that psychologically this generation is universally distinguished by courage, an amazing will to action and no less amazing confidence in the possibility of change 22
This thirst for action is especially noticeable in small-scale and relatively harmless enterprises. Students successfully protested against campus management who paid staff at the cafe, buildings and grounds of the university less than the legal minimum. That includes Berkeley students' decision to join the fight to turn a vacant university site into a "people's park," even though it resulted in the most violent government response in recent memory. Judging by the incident at Berkeley, it seems that it is precisely such "non-political" actions that cause the student body to rally around the radical vanguard. “In the student referendum, which had the largest turnout in student voting history, 85 percent (of nearly 15,000) votes were cast in favor of using the site” as a public park. See the excellent report: Wolin Sh., Schaar J. Berkeley: The Battle of People's Park // New York Review of Books. I969. June I9.

However, these qualities are not the causes [of the riots], and if we ask what actually led to this - completely unforeseen - development of events in universities around the world, it would be absurd to ignore the most obvious and perhaps most influential factor, not which also has no precedents or analogies, namely the simple fact that technological “progress” so often leads straight to disaster 23
It has become a practice to look for precedents and analogies where they simply do not exist, and to avoid describing and thinking about what is now being said and done in the language of contemporary events themselves, under the pretext that we should learn the lessons of the past, especially the lessons of the period between the two world wars. characteristic of so many contemporary discussions. Quite free from this form of escapism is Stephen Spender's brilliant and intelligent report on the student movement, quoted above. He belongs to those very few representatives of his generation who are both sensitive enough to the present and remember their own youth well enough to recognize all the differences between the two eras in mood, style, thinking and action (“today’s students are completely different from the students of Oxford, Cambridge , Harvard, Princeton or Heidelberg forty years ago" [ Spender S. Op cit. P. 165]). But Spender’s position is shared by all those who are truly concerned about the future of the world and man (no matter what generation they belong to), in contrast to those who play with this future. (Sheldon Wallin and John Schaar speak of a “renewed sense of common destiny” that can bind different generations, of “our common fear that scientific weapons will destroy all life, that technology will increasingly deform urban people as it has desecrated the earth and darkened the sky" that "the progress of industry will destroy the very possibility of interesting work and that communications will erase the last traces of the diverse cultures that have been the heritage of all but the most backward societies" [ Wolin Sh., Shaar J. Op. cit.]) It seems quite natural that this position is more often taken by physicists and biologists, rather than representatives of the social sciences, although students of natural faculties are not such zealous rebels as their fellow humanists. Thus, Adolf Portmann, the famous Swiss biologist, believes that the age gap between generations has little to do with the conflict between young and old - this conflict arises with the advent of nuclear science: “as a result, a completely new state of affairs in the world has arisen ... it cannot even be compared with the most powerful revolution of the past" ( Portmann A. Manipulation des Menschen als Schiksal und Bedrohung. Z?rich: Verlag Die Arche, 1969). And Nobel laureate George Wald of Harvard, in his famous speech at the Moscow State University on March 4, 1969, rightly emphasized that teachers understand “the reasons for student anxiety even better than the students themselves,” and, moreover, this anxiety is shared ( Wald G. Op. cit.).

That the sciences taught to this generation not only seem to be unable to correct the catastrophic consequences of their own technology, but have also reached a stage in their development where “virtually nothing can be done that cannot be turned into war.” 24
Jerome Lettvin of MIT thinks so; see: New York Times Magazine. 1969. May 18.

. (To preserve the universities, of course, which, according to Senator Fulbright, betray the public trust once they become dependent on government-funded research projects 25
The modern politicization of universities (a subject of fair regret) is often blamed on rebellious students who allegedly attack universities because they are a weak link in the chain of power. It is quite true that universities will not survive if “intellectual impartiality and the disinterested search for truth” disappear, and, even worse, it is unlikely that any civilized society will be able to survive the disappearance of these strange institutions, the main social and political function of which is precisely their impartiality and independence from public pressure and political power. Power and truth, both completely legitimate in their own sphere, are fundamentally different phenomena, and choosing one or the other as a life goal leads to existentially different life paths. Zbigniew Brzezinski in the article “America in the Technotronic Era” ( Brzezinski Z. America in the Technotronic Age // Encounter. 1968. January) sees this danger, but either has come to terms with it, or is not so alarmed by this prospect. He believes that technotronia will lead to a new “superculture” led by new “intellectuals for whom organizational and applied issues will be central.” (See especially Noam Chomsky's recent critique of The Object activity and liberal sciences» : Chomsky N. Op. cit.) In fact, it is much more likely that this new breed of intellectuals, formerly known as technocrats, will lead to an era of tyranny and extreme sterility.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that before universities were politicized by the student movement, they were politicized by the authorities. The relevant facts are too well known to be cited, but it is worth recalling that we are not talking only about military research here. Henry Steele Commagier recently criticized "the university as an employment agency" (The New Republic, 1968, February 24). Indeed, “no amount of imaginative effort can make one imagine the Dow Chemical Company, the Marines, or the CIA as educational institutions” or organizations dedicated to the search for truth. Mayor John Lindsay questioned whether the university had the right to be called "a special public institution, detached from worldly self-interest, if it speculates in real estate and helps develop and evaluate projects for the army fighting in the Vietnam War" (The Week in Review // New York Times 1969. May 4). Statements that the university is the “brain of society” or the brain of power structures are dangerous arrogant nonsense, if only because society is not an “organism” and certainly not brainless.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I wholeheartedly agree with Stephen Spender that it would be terribly stupid for students to destroy universities (even though they are the only ones who can actually do this for the simple reason that they have the numerical superiority, and therefore the real power), because campuses are this is not only their real, but also the only possible base. “Without the university there would be no students” ( Spender S. Op. cit. P. 22). But universities will remain a base for students only as long as they remain the only place in society where the government does not have a decisive voice, despite all the distortions and distortions of this principle. In the current situation, there is a danger that either the students or, in the case of Berkeley, the authorities will lose their heads; if this happens, the young rebels will simply weave an extra thread into what has been rightly called the “pattern of disaster” (Professor Richard E. Faulk of Princeton).

There is nothing more important than a strictly observed detachment from military-oriented research and all related projects; but it would be naive to hope that such aloofness would change the nature of modern science or hinder the war effort, and equally naive would be to deny that the restrictions to which such aloofness would lead may well have the effect of lowering university standards 26
The continuous flow of basic research from universities to industrial laboratories is significant and supports our thesis.

The only consequence that such a withdrawal would most likely not have would be a complete cessation of federal funding; because, as MIT's Jerome Lettwin recently noted, "the government can't afford not to fund us." 27
Ibid.

Nor can universities afford to forgo federal funding; but this simply means that universities "must learn to filter financial support" (Henry Steele Commager - a difficult but not impossible task in light of the enormous increase in the power of universities in modern society.) In short, the apparently irresistible spread of technology and machinery is not just threatening unemployment for some classes - it threatens the existence of entire countries and, perhaps, all of humanity.

Hannah Arendt

About violence

Published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

© 1969, 1970 by Hannah Arendt

© New publishing house, 2014

To my friend Mary

Chapter first

The reason for these reflections were the events and discussions of the last few years, considered in the context of the entire 20th century, which indeed turned out, as Lenin predicted, to be a century of wars and revolutions, and therefore a century of violence, which is considered to be their common denominator. In the current situation, however, there is another factor which, although not predicted by anyone, is at least as important. The technical evolution of instruments of violence has now reached such a stage that it is no longer possible to imagine any political purpose that would correspond to their destructive potential or justify their practical use in armed conflict. Therefore, war - since time immemorial the ruthless supreme arbiter of international disputes - has lost much of its effectiveness and almost all of its luster. The “apocalyptic” chess game between the superpowers, that is, between states operating at the highest stage of development of our civilization, is played in accordance with the rule “whoever wins, the end of both”; it is a game devoid of any resemblance to any previous war games. Its “rational” goal is deterrence, not victory, and since the arms race is no longer a preparation for war, it can now be justified only on the basis that the greatest deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. The question of how we will ever extricate ourselves from the obvious madness of this situation remains unanswered.

Because violence, unlike power ( power), strength ( force) or power ( strength) – always needs guns(as Engels pointed out long ago), the technological revolution, the revolution in the manufacture of tools, manifested itself especially noticeably in military affairs. The very essence of violent action is governed by the category “means-end,” and in relation to human affairs, the main property of this category is the risk that the goal will be subordinated to the means that it justifies and that are required to achieve it. And since the final end of human action, unlike the final product of production, is not reliably foreseeable, the means used to achieve political ends usually have a greater influence on the future of the world than the intended ends.

The results of any human actions are not subject to the control of the actors, but violence also contains an additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere does Fortune, that is, good or bad luck, play such a fateful role in human affairs as on the battlefield, and this invasion of the unexpected will not disappear if it is called a “chance event” and considered doubtful from a scientific point of view; just as it cannot be eliminated with the help of modeling, [developing] scenarios, game theory, etc. In such matters there is no certainty, not even the final certainty of mutual destruction under such and such calculated conditions. The very fact that those who are perfecting the means of destruction have finally reached such a level of technological development where, thanks to the means at their disposal, their very goal, namely, war, is on the verge of disappearing completely, this very fact serves as an ironic reminder of the ever-present unpredictability that we encounter as soon as we approach the realm of violence. The main reason why war has not yet left us is not the secret desire for death inherent in the human species, not the indomitable instinct of aggression, not (the last and more plausible answer) the serious economic and social dangers associated with disarmament, but the simple fact that there is still no replacement for this final arbiter in international affairs on the political stage. Wasn't Hobbes right when he said: “Treaties without the sword are mere words?”

And it is unlikely that such a replacement will appear as long as national independence, that is, freedom from foreign domination, is identified ( rule), and state sovereignty, i.e. a claim to unrestrained and unlimited power ( power) in international affairs. (The United States is one of the few countries where a proper division of independence and sovereignty is possible, at least in theory, so long as such a division would not threaten the very foundations of the American republic. According to the American Constitution, international treaties form an integral part of federal law and - as noted in 1793 Judge James Wilson - "the concept of sovereignty is completely unknown to the United States Constitution." But the days of such sober and proud detachment from the traditional language and conceptual political scheme of the European nation-state are long gone; the legacy of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better or worse, has become the heir Europe, as if inheriting its ancestral heritage, unaware, alas, of the fact that the decline of European power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of the national state and its concept of sovereignty.) That the war still remains ultima ratio[the latter argument], the continuation of a policy of violent means in relations between undeveloped countries, cannot serve as an argument against its obsolescence, and there cannot be any consolation in the fact that only small countries without nuclear and biological weapons can still afford to fight. It's no secret that the notorious "random event" [that would trigger a nuclear war] is most likely to occur in those parts of the planet where the ancient maxim "victory has no alternative" is still close to the truth.

Under such circumstances, there are indeed few things more fearful than the steadily growing authority of science-oriented experts in government deliberations in recent decades. The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded enough to “think the unthinkable,” but that they don’t think. Instead of doing this old-fashioned non-computerized activity, they calculate the consequences of certain hypothetically possible configurations, however, without being able to test their hypotheses against real facts. The logical flaw in these hypothetical future scenarios is always the same: what initially appears as a hypothesis - with or without implied alternatives, depending on the degree of sophistication of the scenario - instantly, usually after a few paragraphs, turns into a "fact" that then it generates a whole chain of the same non-facts, and as a result, the purely speculative nature of the entire construction is forgotten. Needless to say, this is not science, but pseudoscience - or, to use Noam Chomsky's definition, "a desperate attempt by the social and behavioral sciences to imitate the appearance of sciences that actually have significant intellectual content." And (as Richard N. Goodwin recently pointed out in a review article that had the rare quality of revealing the “unconscious humor” characteristic of many bombastic pseudoscientific theories) the most obvious and “most profound objection to this brand of strategic theory is not its lack of usefulness, but its danger is that it can convince us that we have an understanding of events and control over their course, which we actually do not have.”

Events are, by definition, such occurrences ( occurrences) that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures; Only in a world where nothing significant ever happens can the visions of futurists come true. Predictions of the future are always just projections of current automatic processes and procedures, that is, of those incidents that are supposed to happen if people do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident ( accident) inevitably destroy the entire scheme within which the prediction exists and within which it finds its data. (Fortunately, Proudhon's casual remark is still true:

“The fruitfulness of the unexpected far exceeds the foresight of the statesman.” It is even more obvious that it exceeds the expert’s calculations.) Name such unforeseen, unforeseen and unpredictable incidents ( happenings) "random events" ( random events) or “the last spasms of the past”, dooming them to insignificance or to the notorious “dustbin of history” - this is the most ancient technique of the predictive craft; This technique undoubtedly helps theoretical harmony, but only at the cost of further distance between theory and reality. The danger lies not only in the plausibility of these theories, since they actually take their data from recognizable current trends, but also in the fact that, due to their internal coherence, they have a hypnotic effect - they lull our common sense, which is nothing more than our mental an organ designed to perceive, understand, and interact with reality and factuality.