2009/04/01 by Jan Mieszkowski · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy #War, Ethics, and Justification #Military History and Strategy
paper · doi:10.2979/gso.2009.3.1.18
openalex publication_date 2009/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
The argument of this article is that the modern understanding of warfare is organized by a series of attempts to conceptualize the relationship between language and violence. Examining efforts to rewrite Clausewitz's famous maxim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, I consider the difficulties that arise in distinguishing rhetorical from non-rhetorical models of battle. Paradoxically, the impulse to generalize physical combat as a basic paradigm of social experience reveals that military praxis is as much a struggle of words as a clash of swords or an exchange of missiles. Even in Hannah Arendt, who starkly opposes violence and reasoned discourse, the understanding of war rests on a notion of intra-linguistic abuse, the idea that words can injure words. In the final analysis, war is not politics waged otherwise; rather politics depends on an appeal to a verbal militarism that should, politically speaking, be impossible.