Critique of Violence
1921 essay on law-making vs law-preserving violence, the police, and divine violence. Public domain.
Mechanisms
The police suspend the distinction
The police are the zone where law-making and law-preserving blur into one body — acting where law cannot reach, which is why every emergency eventually lives there permanently.
The police intervene "for security reasons" in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists, when they are not merely permitted by law to act but when the legal order is not directly threatened.
Why it matters
The police are the zone where law-making and law-preserving blur into one body — acting where law cannot reach, which is why every emergency eventually lives there permanently.
Use when: "For security reasons" appears as the justification.
Arguments
Lawmaking is power making
Founding a legal order is itself an act of violence — justice and power are different principles, and law is built on the second while claiming the first.
Lawmaking is power making, and, to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine end making, power the principle of all mythical lawmaking.
Why it matters
Founding a legal order is itself an act of violence — justice and power are different principles, and law is built on the second while claiming the first.
Use when: Someone treats the law as neutral ground rather than a settlement imposed by force.
The state fears violence for its mere existence outside the law
The monopoly on force isn't about public safety — it's about the law's self-preservation.
The interest of the law in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is explained not by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by the intention of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.
Why it matters
The monopoly on force isn't about public safety — it's about the law's self-preservation. Rival violence is threatening simply by existing outside the state's hands.
Use when: A crackdown looks wildly disproportionate to the actual threat.
Concepts
All violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving
The essay's master distinction: every violence the state deploys is either founding a legal order or defending one — there is no third, neutral kind.
All violence as a means is either law-making or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.
Why it matters
The essay's master distinction: every violence the state deploys is either founding a legal order or defending one — there is no third, neutral kind.
Use when: Classifying any state use of force, from airstrikes to arrests.
Mythic violence vs divine violence
Benjamin's exit from the circle: a violence that neither founds nor preserves law but annihilates it — the essay's answer to a legal order that feeds on its own exceptions.
If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody the latter is lethal without spilling blood.
Why it matters
Benjamin's exit from the circle: a violence that neither founds nor preserves law but annihilates it — the essay's answer to a legal order that feeds on its own exceptions.
Use when: A rupture fits neither revolution (new law) nor reform (same law).
'Thou shalt not kill' is a guideline, not a criterion
Even the absolute commandment leaves the exception to solitary responsibility — no law can decide in advance when it may be suspended, which is exactly where sovereign power lives.
"Thou shalt not kill" is not a criterion for judgement. It is a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.
Why it matters
Even the absolute commandment leaves the exception to solitary responsibility — no law can decide in advance when it may be suspended, which is exactly where sovereign power lives.
Use when: The exception is invoked and someone claims the law already settled it.