ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt's reflections on violence form a relatively short essay on the political phenomenology of violent action, written in late 1968 in an attempt to contextualize the tumultuous unrest caused by the civil rights movement in the US and to account for the monumental outbreak of violence all over the world during that memorable year. One could suggest that Arendts magnum opus The Human Condition delineated an anthropology of acting and being in contradiction to that of the dominant existentialist paradigm. Jean Paul Sartre suggested that in moments of political unrest, through street violence and mass rallies the individual became fused again with the collective body and regained its authentic social nature. This aspect of the debate will be another target of Arendts criticism, but it will be closer to her approach, without however any attempt on her part to psychologize violent behavior. Violence continued to dominate the social arena through overt confrontational activism and open conflicts.
