From Crises of the Republic (Hannah Arendt, 1972) p114-5
They [knew] only too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that they were always and everywhere the necessary result of circumstances entirely independent of the will and guidance of particular parties and whole classes.”
On the level of theory there were a few exceptions. Georges Sorel, who at the beginning of the century tried to combine Marxism with Bergson’s philosophy of life— the result, though on a much lower level of sophistication, is oddly similar to Sartre’s current amalgamation of existentialism and Marxism — thought of class struggle in military terms; yet he ended by proposing nothing more violent than the famous myth of the general strike, a form of action which we today would think of as belonging rather to the arsenal of nonviolent politics. Fifty years ago even this modest proposal earned him the reputation of being a fascist, notwithstanding his enthusiastic approval of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. Sartre, who in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth goes much farther in his glorification of violence than Sorel in his famous Reflections on Violence — farther than Fanon himself, whose argument he wishes to bring to its conclusion — still mentions ‘“‘Sorel’s fascist utterances.” This shows to what extent Sartre is unaware of his basic disagreement with Marx on the question of violence, especially when he states that “irrepressible violence . . . is man recreating himself,” that it is through “mad fury” that “the wretched of the earth” can “become men.” These notions are all the more remarkable because the idea of man creating himself is strictly in the tradition of Hegelian and Marxian thinking; it is the very basis of all leftist humanism. But according to Hegel man “produces” himself through thought, whereas for Marx, who turned Hegel’s “idealism” upside down, it was labor, the human form of metabolism with nature, that fulfilled this function. And though one may argue that all notions of man creating himself have in common a rebellion against the very factuality of the human condition — nothing is more obvious than that man, whether as member of the species or as an individual, does not owe his existence to himself — and that therefore what Sartre, Marx, and Hegel have in common is more relevant than the particular activities through which this non-fact should presumably have come about, still it cannot be denied that a gulf separates the essentially peaceful activities of thinking and laboring from all deeds of violence. “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone . . . there remain a dead man and a free man,” says Sartre in his preface. This is a sentence Marx could never have written.
I quoted Sartre in order to show that this new shift toward violence in the thinking of revolutionaries can remain unnoticed even by one of their most representative and articulate spokesmen, and it is all the more noteworthy for evidently not being an abstract notion in the history of ideas. (If one turns the “idealistic” concept of thought upside down, one might arrive at the “materialistic” concept of labor; one will never arrive at the notion of violence.) No doubt all this has a logic of its own, but it is one springing from experience, and this experience was utterly unknown to any generation before.
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