Power and Violence

Arendt did not, of course, scapegoat African events for Europe's violence, and she cannot be faulted with teleology. Origins consists precisely of arguments that correspond to the perplexing course of a true boomerang­like violence with its strange turns and multiple pathways, along with its contingencies and its ruptures.

Like several generations of scholars, Arendt follows J. A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study (1902) towards the links uniting imperialism and capitalism.^[447] Unlike Hobson's Marxist readers, however, she does not see the state as the simple instrument of capitalists, even if she accepts the view that the state did capitalism's bidding. The originality of her argument in comparison to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and their own readings of imperialism comes from the fact that Arendt maintains clear distinctions ‘between capitalism as an economic system, the bourgeoisie as a social class, and the nation state as a political formation', as philosopher Seyla Benhabib writes.^[448] Moreover, Arendt historicises these distinctions, point­ing to a sort of division of labour that existed prior to the imperial era, when, for example, the bourgeoisie and capitalism recognised a separate sphere for the state.^[449] This changed in the imperial era when the boundaries that separated these institutions and their distinct norms collapsed. In this sense, whereas Lenin saw imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, Arendt saw it as the first stage in the political triumph of the bourgeoisie.

This triumph was marked by economic concepts and ideals making their way into the sphere of political philosophy and transforming the norms of the liberal (or liberalising) state. The never-ending economic accumulation sought by capitalism transformed itself into a never-ending accumulation of power.

Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central political idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the long history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising origin­ality - surprising because entirely new concepts are very rare in politics - is simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broad­ening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century.⁵⁰

So rather than a break in the civilising process caused by soiling one's hands in overseas conquest, Arendt points to this transposition which changed the political field, and with it the foundations of the state.