AN EVALUATION OF VIOLENCE AND POWER IN ARENDT’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Arendt’s radical thinking of the conceptualization of violence and power was a response to the failings of global democracies. Those who wield power used violence to perpetrate their “frescos stupidity”. Her thought was also a response to the negative implication of violence that is presently bedeviling our contemporary world today. These fundamental challenges facing our world today include wars, kidnapping, corruption, social injustices, inequality, inhuman conditions, abject poverty, hunger, poor economic system, food shortages, national insecurity, inflation, lawlessness, lack of social order and rule of law, oppression, rigging of elections, poor infrastructures, low life expectancy, poor health care system, international diplomatic conflicts, manufacturing of nuclear weapons for mass destruction, political assassination, terror and terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and human nature. Arendt’s notion of power presupposes the fact that political power should aim at promoting the public good and to ensure the normative possibility of the good life in democratic society. Politics is aimed at the common good and by giving meaning to the existence of the human being. This paper, therefore, concludes that one of the strengths of Arendt’s theory is that politics is not just a process but a socio-cosmic and praxiological imperative of human existential dimension. Politics retains an epistemological outlook in terms of human political and existential relationship. Finally, the epistemic realism of politics is anchored on the normative framework of the common good of all in any democratic society.