Political violence and terror: Arendtian reflections

This essay takes a critical look at the rubric 'Age of Terror,' a rubric which has enjoyed a certain amount of theoretical and philosophical cachet in recent years. My argument begins by noting the continuity between this hypostatization and contemporary 'War on Terror' rhetoric, a continuity that is, in certain respects, ironic given the politics of the 'Age of Terror' theorists. It then moves-via Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt-to a consideration of the topics of state violence (on the one hand) and totalitarian terror (on the other). I use Arendt's theorization of totalitarian terror for a dual purpose: first, to emphasize the gap between totalitarian terror and the more familiar 'terror as means'; second, to question the characterization of recent Islamic terrorism as totalitarian in essence. Arendt's distinctions between violence, terror and totalitarian terror help us avoid the Schmittian logic installed by advocates of the 'War on Terror' and by a variety of writers anxious to identify a ill-defined and generic 'totalitarianism' as the transhistorical and transcultural 'other' of liberalism.