360
PARTISAN REVIEW
Like the Romans, Machiavelli and Ro bespierre felt founding was the
centra l po litical acti on ... but unl ike the Romans, to whom thi s was
an event of the past, they felt that for thi s su preme "end" all
"means," and chi efl y the mea ns of violence, were justified . T h ey
understood the act of founding entirely in the image of making. ...
[It
is
1
because of his rediscovery of the foundati on experi ence and hi s
reinterpretation
of it in terms of the justifi cation of (vio lent ) means
for a supreme end, that Machi avelli may be regarded as the ances tor
of modern revoluti ons. (Itali cs added ).
By
On R evolution,
however, she rea lized tha t the Roma n experi ence of
founding a lso had a violent element expressed in the legend of
Romulus's slaying of Remus. But her uneasines about overempha
I Z–
ing the vi olent nature of the act of founding led her to o bserve:
It
was perhaps because of the inner affinity between the arbitrariness
inherent in all beginnings, and human po tentialiti es fo r crime that
the Romans decided to derive their descendance not from Romulus,
who had slain Remus, but from Aeneas.
Altho ugh she admitted tha t even Aeneas had been in volved in a war
with the na ti ve Itali ans, she excused thi s by say ing tha t according to
Virgil , hi s war was fought
to
undo the earli er war against T roy. T he
po int of this argument is tha t even the founda ti on of Rome harkened
back to an earli er traditi on , but wha t comes through far clea rer is the
affinit y between beginnings and violence.
Wha t makes thi s point worth stressing is tha t such an affinity
serves
to
muddy her di stincti on between vi olence and po litics, the la tter
having been defined over and over aga in in terms of the capacity to
begin. By
Crises of the R epublic,
the confusion was total as she wrote:
A characteristi c of human action is that it always begins something
new, and this does no t mean that it is ever permitted to start
ab
ova,
to create
ex
nihilo.
In order to ma ke room for one's own action :
something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and
things as they were before are changed .
T hus the waterti ght separa tion between violence and po litics proves in
the end to be porous, and we are left with the age-old su spicion tha t the
vi olence at the origin of a po lity lingers beneath the surface however
legitima te its founda tion may appear to la ter generati on s.
If,
then , one can say tha t Hannah Arendt's grasp of Marx, her chi ef
po lemical ri val , was uncerta in , and tha t her di stincti on between
po litics and violence is less than con vincing, how sa tisfactory was the
remainder of her political theory? Can her brand of " tender" political
