Non-violent power: citizenship and political perception in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

The complex relationships between politics, law and power in modern and contemporary philosophy are strongly marked by the identity established between power, violence and domination. Theorists like Hobbes, Weber and Schmitt argue from different perspectives a state power that possesses attributes as the monopoly of force and the legitimate use of violence. However, in the first half of the twentieth century Hannah Arendt offers us a vision of political action in direct opposition to the traditional idea of power linked to domination mechanisms that justify violence and coercion. This is the revolutionary idea of nonviolent power based on the ability of human beings to act in a public, free and egalitarian space, where it is possible to generate other forms of cohabitation and other ways of exercising citizenship among companies democratic, open and pluralistic. Hannah Arendt’s vision is therefore highly relevant for understanding power in today’s world and becomes a wake-up call against the threat of the emergence of new despotism and totalitarianism that hamper the political action in shared spaces of freedom.