Political Theory and Political Action: A Guide Through the Archives

After George Floyd’s killing by the Minneapolis police in May 2020 renewed nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, certain observers voiced concerns that some of the actions associated with these demonstrations threatened the movement’s larger purpose. President Barack Obama, for one, cautioned that “[w]hether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism” those “resort[ing] to violence in various forms” were “compounding the destruction of neighborhoods . . . often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause” of racial justice. ¹ We must not “excuse violence or rationalize it, or participate in it,” Obama insisted, but instead translate our hopes and frustrations alike into “electoral politics” and “voting.” ²

Meanwhile, many activists looked warily at politicians’ attempts to meet the moment by urging people to channel their energies into institutional procedures. “I tried that,” one protestor told The New York Times, “I voted for the right people. And this . . . still happens.” ³ Being out on the street, demonstrators argued, accomplished something that more routine forms of political engagement had not and perhaps could not. “There’s a power in using your body, and actually physically being there,” explained another activist, “Oftentimes, our voices aren’t heard and this is the only way we’re able to get our message across.” ⁴ Responding to Obama directly, scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor went further, urging attentiveness to what fuels violent turns in protests and interrogating the “alienation that is so profound . . . that it compels people to fight with the intensity of a riot to demand things change.” ⁵

These duelling perspectives call to mind well-known debates about the most effective strategies for movements to employ. But alongside that tactical question lies a different puzzle. What relationship is politics supposed to have to violence, if politics is to retain its distinctiveness as one among many possible ways of engaging with the world and survive as a valuable form of action? Where, for instance, Carl Schmitt took political action to entail affirmatively recognizing the possibility of violence and abandoning any fantasy of overcoming it, Hannah Arendt saw violence as antithetical to political action’s construction of a world of speech and reason. Put otherwise, theorists tend to characterize either the resort to violence or else its absolute avoidance as depoliticizing. Versions of these countervailing intuitions not only shape the history of political thought but remain with us today. Inflecting public discourse around the current Black Lives Matter protests, they leave us with the question of what it means for people to act politically.

This puzzle as to why we characterize and hold up some human actions as political, especially when it comes to their relationship to violence, is the focus of this guide. To what extent is violence constitutive of political action? Alternatively, to what extent must violence recede for politics to even begin?

Moreover, should these questions be framed differently in historical conditions that are themselves pervaded by violence? After all, the Black Lives Matter protests raise additional questions that escape the contours of this binary discourse. For one, and despite the usual focus on protestors’ actions, violence has a more ubiquitous presence. What these rallies and marches have been contesting is police brutality and state violence as a background condition of everyday life, as well as the increasingly militarized force deployed against communities of color. And those protesting have been met with this force, as law enforcement tear-gassed, beat, and shot rubber bullets into crowds. This produces an asymmetry, in which some public discourses treat the interventions of civil actors as too violent to be political when what they are challenging is the normalization of violence by agents of the state, conventionally understood as the political actor par excellence. ⁶ This complicates theoretical efforts to ascertain what political action is amid conditions of violence. It forces us to at least ask whose political actions are registered as violent and whose are not, and how they come to be coded as such.

Furthermore, protesters have also contested the idea that violence is only an active practice, only something one does with one’s body. From coast to coast, demonstrators held signs and placards proclaiming “silence = violence” or, more specifically, “white silence = violence.” In so doing, activists portrayed the absence of action—here understood not just as deploying one’s body, but also one’s speech—as equatable to, and complicit with, direct force. How might this complicate expectations regarding the relationship between political action and the use of one’s body? If behaviors ranging from assault to passivity are being cast as violence, can its presence or absence be a stable criterion through which to define what constitutes political action?

We turn to the archives of Political Theory to think through this constellation of questions. The articles examined in this guide trouble the notion that either violence or nonviolence is a definitional feature of political action. Some of our contributors put pressure on this idea by identifying actions and practices that are political by virtue of falling into a middle ground between violence and nonviolence; others redefine what is meant by these terms in order to reclaim violence or nonviolence as political modes of action, while a few raise questions about such classificatory endeavors altogether. Throughout these essays, the role that the body ought to play in political action recurs as an insistent theme. Finally, a methodological common thread that runs through many of these pieces is the effort to ground political theorizing in the study of political actors’ practices, including the practices of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The history of political thought witnesses many theorists endorsing the idea that politics and violence go hand in hand. For instance, in what Sheldon Wolin later called “the economy violence,” Machiavelli theorized violence as an integral dimension of political action. ⁷ Rather than something to be escaped or quelled, violence is to be managed and strategically exercised by political actors whose tactical use of cruelty, if well deployed, can in fact diminish the “amount of suffering in the political condition.” ⁸ Writing amid the bloody conflict of the English Civil War, Hobbes, too, saw the use of violence as essential to the political amelioration of human suffering. Political life, he reasoned, originates in our contractual efforts to overcome the “continual fear and danger of violent death” otherwise endemic to human experience. ⁹ Yet the social contract redresses such violence not by doing away with it altogether, but by vesting state sovereignty with the power to impose “violent death” for the sake of ensuring peace. Aspects of this notion can be found some centuries later in the works of Max Weber and Schmitt, each of whom in his own way likewise viewed violence as an essential feature of political life. For Weber, the modern state has come to be the “form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory.” ¹⁰ Where, then, the state alone enjoys the “‘right’ to use violence,” politics becomes the quest to enjoy a “share of power or to influence the distribution of power” either between or within states. ¹¹ For Schmitt, the political is best defined by a fundamental distinction between friend and enemy, into which is built the “ever present possibility of combat” and the very “real possibility of physical killing.” ¹² To suppress, tame, or neuter the possibility of violent confrontation would be to eradicate the possibility of the political altogether.

Other theorists, however, have understood political action in contradistinction with violence. Arendt, for one, theorized violence as the opposite of power, which she took to be the ability to act together with others toward a shared political aim. ¹³ Whereas violence makes use of coercion and operates outside of the realm of politics, power employs persuasion and rests on consent, constituting political space. This was understood by the Greeks, Arendt argues, who equated political speech and action and viewed efforts to “force people by violence” or “command rather than persuade” as “prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis.” ¹⁴ In fact, Arendt contends, it is the modern approach to viewing politics as a human fabrication that explains its particular enthrallment to violence and eagerness to see it as an integral part of political action. ¹⁵ Violence is an inescapable part of making and building, which entails doing “violence to nature” in the course of manipulating its resources for human ends. ¹⁶ This is why many, though not all, modern revolutions “glorif[y]” violence as the “only means for ‘making’” the body politic anew. ¹⁷ Opposing violence to power, however, Arendt emphasizes not the centrality of coercion or combat to politics, but the “‘sharing of words and deeds.’” ¹⁸

Our first contributor to the guide, Jean Bethke Elshtain, is in part animated by Arendt’s effort to delineate a sphere proper to political action. Writing during the Cold War, when many political theorists found themselves caught between the imperatives of militarization and de-escalation, Elshtain challenges the reduction of political action to either violence or nonviolence or, as she frames it, either war or peace. In her 1985 article, “Reflections on War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War, and Feminism in a Nuclear Age,” she faults various models of international relations for assimilating politics to war and “militariz[ing] . . . citizenship.” ¹⁹ She laments the “Hobbesian social ontology” that casts politics as the “continuation of war by war-like means” and expects all citizens to resemble warriors of “armed civic virtue.” ²⁰ But in rejecting a militarized model of citizenship, Elshtain does not embrace its most obvious alternative. She is also unsatisfied with what she calls “peace discourse,” which she associates with Christianity and whose erasure of violence from politics altogether she also finds unpalatable. ²¹

The powerful suspicion that underlies Elshtain’s dissatisfaction is that these two ways of thinking about politics, which seem so diametrically opposed, might in fact be two sides of the same coin. ²² Analyzing the gendered portrayals of each account, Elshtain argues that the contrast between the Hobbesian and Christian ontologies maps onto a constraining binary that associates politics with either “the masculine” or “the feminine.” Although these poles may appear to be opposites, they in fact reinforce each other’s limitations. It is perhaps easier to see why thinkers who favor “peace discourse” would point to the deadly dangers and instability of omnipresent war as their foil, but Elshtain makes the case that the reverse is true as well: those who theorize political action in terms of violence and war argue that a pacified politics reduces it to routine and repetitive acts of social reproduction. ²³

To think beyond this binary and propose a feminist alternative to associating politics with either the masculine or the feminine, Elshtain turns to Arendt’s On Violence. Elshtain takes the Arendtian concept of natality to be simultaneously “powerful but pacific,” thereby defying the either/or terms of war and peace. ²⁴ For Elshtain, Arendt also shares the goal of trying to “rescue politics from war” and “resist the reduction of politics to domination,” ²⁵ and she too wishes to do this without simply reducing politics to domination’s opposite. ²⁶ In “deviriliz[ing]” politics, Elshtain argues, she does not in turn “feminiz[e]” it. ²⁷ Arendt’s alternative is to be found in a re-conceptualized notion of citizenship in which emphasis is placed on our power to “act in concert and to begin anew.” ²⁸ Construing citizens as “neither victims nor warriors,” on Elshtain’s reading, Arendt’s thought invites us to recognize “our own vulnerable beginnings and . . . dependency on others” at the same time that it celebrates the “miracle” of our collective power to give birth to new “political beginnings.” ²⁹ As the wellspring or “root” of political action, then, natality is neither strictly bellicose nor strictly peaceful, but instead at once world-changing and fragile. ³⁰ In short, Elshtain finds in Arendtian natality a means of escaping the association of political action with either violence or nonviolence.

Michael Feola takes a different route to the comparable goal of uncovering a range of political practices that resist this binary codification in his 2017 essay “The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency.” His distinct contribution is to reimagine the role that the body plays in political action. Where some who want to theorize models of politics in contradistinction with violence turn to forms of acting that privilege speech and language, Feola is more wary of speech-centric modes of political action. He worries that overemphasizing “linguistic interchange” runs the risk of being apolitical and tends to perpetuate the institutional and discursive status quo. ³¹ This all too often, Feola cautions, results in a failure to protect vulnerable and marginalized people who are more frequently subjected to “institutional violence” and harm. ³²

Feola responds by turning away from language and toward the body, whose overlooked “arts” are crucial to promoting real change. In order to appreciate the political quality of the body, Feola asks us to pay attention to the visual aspects of embodied action, which “suggest possibilities for agency” otherwise “obscured by a hyper-emphasis on linguistic exchange.” ³³ He enumerates a set of “radical bodily acts”—like “feigned crucifixions, self-immolation, mouths/eyes sewn shut, hunger strikes, sit-ins, pray-ins, [and] die-ins”—that center on physical engagement and “staged” performances of violence toward the self, but are not mere exertions of force. These “arts of the body” function as “provocation[s] that demand something in response” from those who witness them. ³⁴ They are an important medium for democratic action because they allow “marginalized groups and agents” to act politically even when excluded from “civic languages” and “discourse.” ³⁵ Because “[s]uch displays expose how the state protects some, while stunting or threatening others,” they have the power to “implicate . . . onlookers” otherwise dismissive of or insensitive to the claims of the excluded. ³⁶ In short, for Feola, putting one’s body on the line and compelling spectators to think about societal violence through its dramatized enactment imbues these actions with a political quality that merely discursive practices may lack. ³⁷

Sharing Feola’s political theoretical attention to the body, Farah Godrej likewise challenges any simple reduction of political action to violence or nonviolence. Her approach to confronting the limits of this dichotomy is to study a figure generally read as emblematic of the politics qua nonviolence approach: Mahatma Gandhi. ³⁸ In “Ascetics, Warriors, and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” Godrej critically reconstructs the familiar reading of Gandhi’s nonviolent philosophy that associates it with austerity and asceticism, which is to say with a denial of the body and retreat from active worldly engagement. She makes the case that contemporary environmental movements in particular are keen to read Gandhi in this vein, emphasizing in his work the importance of ethical “self-scrutiny” and applying it to patterns of “bodily consumpti[on]” today. ³⁹

Yet to understand Gandhi in this manner, Godrej argues, is to lose sight of the confrontational dimensions of his political thought. She explains that the reason these standard readings of Gandhi favor an ascetic renunciation of the body has to do with an assumption that the “only condition under which bodies can be engaged in political action” is violence. ⁴⁰ This is why they seek to ground political action, insofar as it ought to be nonviolent, in a “higher capacity,” like the intellect, that is thoroughly stripped of its bodily weight. Put otherwise, such readings rest on a flawed dichotomy between mind and body; they view the only alternative to “embodied engagement understood as war, violence, or brute strength” to be a “disembodied politics characterized by nonviolent reason, discourse, and speech.” ⁴¹

To correct for this wariness of physical contestation, Godrej directs our attention to the figure of the warrior-ascetic in Gandhi’s thought, identifying through this archetype forms of political action that complicate the violence–nonviolence distinction by inhabiting a middle-ground between them. In brief, she argues that this notion of citizenship interweaves warrior-like action with practices of ascetic abnegation. To construct this possibility, Godrej disentangles the body from any simplistic association with brute strength. Her intervention suggests that bodies can be vehicles for collective political action that is disruptive but nevertheless eschews violence. She, similarly to Feola, enumerates what these practices are: “boycotting, striking, marching, protesting, and actively working to abolish any system of governance damaging to just forms of life.” ⁴² Gandhi’s thought, in other words, “makes it possible for . . . nonviolence to be thoughtfully and successfully assertive, even combative or disruptive, while remaining peaceful in its disavowal of violence.” ⁴³ For Godrej, then, Gandhi has theorized a model of embodied political action that is informed by an ethics of self-restraint yet remains deeply confrontational.

Luke Philip Plotica shares Godrej’s interest in illuminating the political quality of a heretofore neglected set of actions. In his case focusing on acts that belong to the realm of the intimate and personal, Plotica too turns to a seminal figure associated with nonviolence–Henry David Thoreau. ⁴⁴ In “Thoreau and the Politics of Ordinary Actions,” Plotica’s concern is not that Thoreau scholars have interpreted him as having an inadequate account of political action, but rather that they read him as an altogether apolitical thinker. The premise of this scholarship is that Thoreau’s pursuit of “personal principle and judgment” can only lead to “apolitical actions” because genuine political engagement is necessarily collective. ⁴⁵ Plotica rebuts that idea, reading Thoreau to demonstrate that action does not have to take a collective form to be political, and that failure to meet this criterion is not indicative of apolitical quietism.

Plotica argues that one reason some are reluctant to embrace the idea that personal acts can be political is the premise that political action must be agonistic or confrontational. To do this, he sets out to expand our appreciation of nonviolent action in a way that makes it thoroughly political. This is a different path than the one pioneered by Godrej and Feola, who ascertained a set of practices that are political insofar as they evade the descriptors violent and nonviolent. Through his revisionary reading of Thoreau, Plotica reformulates nonviolent withdrawal into the self as a confrontational provocation. He highlights the “political valence” of practices that are ostensibly so peaceful as to be apolitical, ⁴⁶ and argues that Thoreau’s retreat from society and institutions constitutes a political act tantamount to a “quiet act of war.” ⁴⁷

Plotica makes that seeming oxymoron into the basis of a new and “robust model of individual political agency,” ⁴⁸ one that takes into account how we are “situated” in relation to others and exercise agency in connection with them. ⁴⁹ By withdrawing from the institutions of collective life, especially those through which slavery was upheld, Thoreau sought to “awaken” his fellow citizens to their own “subtle support” and unwitting responsibility for the perpetuation of immoral practices. ⁵⁰ In this way an “agent provocateur” committed to fully inhabiting and living out his principles, Thoreau led by the example of his own life and saw his disengagement not as a “pacifist refusal to join the fray,” but as a way to obtain the radical transformation of collective life. ⁵¹ Often written off as selfish or excessively individualistic, a refusal to participate in existing forms of social life should, Plotica contends via Thoreau, be seen as agonistic and thereby political through and through.

Where Plotica redefines nonviolence, Juliet Hooker reimagines its opposite. She theorizes the purpose violence may serve as a mode of political action, and interrogates the constraints imposed on marginalized people for their actions to register to others as political in the first place. In “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair,” Hooker reconstructs the implications of the demands that people protesting racial injustice act “respectably.” She shows that onlookers are quick to depoliticize radical demonstrations by rejecting them as instances of violence. Black Lives Matter protests, for instance, are often characterized as “unlawful ‘riots,’” as demands abound that proper democratic politics remain “‘appropriate,’” “strictly legal,” and “exemplary.” ⁵² “What is the economy of suffering,” Hooker asks in response to this dynamic, “that requires protestors or victims of police violence to suffer more in order to merit care and concern on the part of their fellow citizens, when their lives are already shaped by violence and other forms of loss?” ⁵³ She argues that these public discourses and media frames present “peaceful acquiescence” as a virtue for African Americans while exonerating violent actions perpetrated against them. This discredits active resistance to the status quo, and amounts to a demand that some groups simply submit to oppressive structures and behaviors. ⁵⁴

Hooker argues that such racially different expectations are in part supported by theories of democracy that emphasize self-sacrifice and by the notions of historical change that underwrite them. Romantic understandings of history that culminate in reconciliation and assume progress to be on the horizon restrict the range of actions perceived to be democratically legitimate. Sacrifices must be made now, these views encourage, for the sake of future rehabilitation: “[T]he romantic narrative of the civil rights movement shifts attention away from black loss to the idea that black politics should be oriented toward the goal of democratic repair.” ⁵⁵ Hence Hooker contends that romantic emplotments of historical time tend to delegitimize anger and violence as appropriate responses to “racial terror,” privileging instead “well-behaved, respectable, middle-class” forms of protest and action. ⁵⁶

Instead, Hooker draws on the “fugitive tradition” within black political thought to reconceptualize violence in a way that draws out its political dimensions. ⁵⁷ She points to forms of action—like rioting—that either “do not fit easily within the bounds of liberal democracy” or are otherwise not “strictly legal.” ⁵⁸ “[P]erhaps,” she writes, “we should instead consider instances of ‘rioting’ as a form of democratic redress for black citizens, even if in and of themselves they cannot transform the prevailing racial order.” ⁵⁹ By providing an outlet for the “expression of black pain and anger,” such “instances of violence” might “constitute a form of democratic repair for African Americans” precisely because this pain and anger is otherwise denied all expression and required to cloak itself in a pacific veneer. ⁶⁰ When riots are redefined in this way as a response to racialized trauma, Hooker suggests that they can offer a first step toward collective healing. Hooker thus concludes that, while rejected by some as exceeding the bounds of politics, such practices are indeed political, and in fact invaluable to democracy.

Kathy Ferguson shares Hooker’s contention that the way in which political actions are perceived and interpreted by observers is shaped by social forces and entangled with power. In “Discourses of Danger: Locating Emma Goldman,” Ferguson shows that politics determines whether or not a given act appears violent. ⁶¹ She tracks the “discourse-generating networks” that have cast Goldman into the figure of the violent agitator. ⁶² Ferguson details how an “intensified legal and police apparatus; an expanding national and international press network; and an array of medical and psychiatric technologies” assisted in “the construal of Goldman as a dangerous individual,” such that “her presence in public life” came to be framed “primarily within the discourses of danger [these technologies] generated.” ⁶³ This threatening portrayal of Goldman as one of the “‘most dangerous anarchists in America’” then helped to conceal the repression that befell labor organizers in the early twentieth century. ⁶⁴

Interestingly, Ferguson explains that part of Goldman’s own activism consisted in spreading counter-discourses capable of framing state and corporate actions against labor as themselves violent. That is, in addition to “insist[ing] that political violence was an understandable response to oppression,” Goldman also turned the accusations of danger and violence against her opponents. ⁶⁵ “‘Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government,” she reasoned, “political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean.’” ⁶⁶ Ferguson argues that Goldman was thereby able to challenge the “legitimacy of state and corporate agents,” win the moral high ground for her allies, and “[cultivate] the discursive resources Americans needed to recalibrate capitalism’s bloody price.” ⁶⁷ Yet even when we are attentive to Goldman’s countervailing strategies, Ferguson warns, continuing to assess how dangerous or violent she was is not without risk. Focusing on the dangerousness of Goldman’s thought and activism “may indirectly allow the historic alibi for anti-labor violence to continue operating,” which in turn may effectively “[shrink] the available political imaginary through which we might create alternative visions of political life” today. ⁶⁸

Ferguson and Hooker both encourage us to reckon with the fact that who is acting shapes how a given act is perceived and classified. This perspective complicates theoretical efforts to determine what actions can reliably be seen as political. As has emerged in this guide, many such endeavors end up asking what actions are violent, what actions are nonviolent, and whether politics can be located somewhere in between. But as Hooker and Ferguson suggest, those descriptive labels themselves merit scrutiny: the doling out of the label “political” is itself entangled in racial, social, and economic perceptions. Separately, some of the authors reviewed in this guide trouble the drive to establish politics as a purely distinct sphere. They draw out political qualities even in the behaviors that may be the likeliest to be dismissed as apolitical—individualistic retreats into the self for Plotica, and riots for Hooker.

We then have to confront a difficult set of questions: Can we really identify distinctly political actions in light of the multifaceted meanings of any act? Should we even be trying to do so given the trappings of power? Is it possible to distinguish politics from other modes of human action in a way that recognizes the potential risks of depoliticizing what others are doing? Is it possible to do so in a way that acknowledges that any specific act could take on a range of connotations depending on who performs and who watches it?

Public discourses—as exemplified by the exchanges about the 2020 protests—often mirror political theoretical endeavors to ascertain what modes of action belong to politics, as opposed to other human phenomena like social unrest, the routine trappings of institutions, or self-centered individualism that political theorists tend to want to keep separate from it so as to allow politics to retain its integrity. Taken collectively, though, the essays reviewed here invite us to bring more nuance to these discourses in at least two ways. First, they provide roadmaps to expanding the range of actions we scrutinize, especially when it comes to the gradations between violence and nonviolence. Second, they encourage us to consider how writing off certain things as apolitical—including violence or nonviolence—is itself a form of political action. Although the observers quoted at the outset of this guide eyed some forms of action warily, hoping to steer actors toward either “electoral politics” or toward “using your body” lest they somehow miss the point of politics altogether, we might reflect on how such interventions work to shape our perceptions of the political too. At a time when some have begun to defend the deployment of U.S. federal forces against those calling for racial justice on the grounds that demonstrators are “violent anarchists,” ⁶⁹ attending to such nuance becomes all the more important.

Essays in this Theme Collection

Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflections on War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War, and Feminism in a Nuclear Age,” Political Theory 13, no. 1 (1985): 39–57.

Michael Feola, “The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency,” Political Theory 46, no. 2 (2018): 197–217.

Farah Godrej, “Ascetics, Warriors, and a Gandhian Ecological Citizenship,” Political Theory 40, no. 4 (2012): 437–65.

Luke Philip Plotica, “Thoreau and the Politics of Ordinary Actions,” Political Theory 44, no. 4 (2016): 470–95.

Juliet Hooker, “Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair,” Political Theory 44, no. 4 (2016): 448–69.

Kathy E. Ferguson, “Discourses of Danger: Locating Emma Goldman,” Political Theory 36, no. 5 (2008): 735–61.