Violence, Law, and Politics: Hannah Arendt and Robert M. Cover in Comparative Perspective

Criminal Justice Ethics 34 (3):312-337 (2015)
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Abstract

Despite many significant points of intersection between his work and that of Hannah Arendt, the legal scholar Robert Cover largely declined to engage her perspective, which posed major challenges to his own. While scholars seeking to rethink Cover's legacy in order to develop a jurisprudence of violence have criticized Cover's acquiescence to the Hobbesian model of the sovereign state, they have similarly ignored Arendt's critique of the Hobbesian model and her attempts to build an alternative to it. This article examines central issues of convergence and divergence between Arendt's and Cover's approaches to law, politics, and violence with the aim to redress this neglect of Arendt's perspective. It begins by focusing on their interpretations of the role and significance of the courtroom trial. It then compares their analysis of the character, effects, and implications of domination as a type of organized power and as a means of conceptualizing punishment, before it concentrates on their instrumental conception of violence, the issue of justification, and its relationship to power. The article concludes by arguing that Arendt's approach, which situates an analysis of law and violence within a broader critique of modernity, provides a more trenchant critical framework for examining the rise of the carceral state than does Cover's.

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Citations of this work

The Grey Zones of Violence in Political Resistance.Tal Correm - 2020 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 67 (165):10-36.

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References found in this work

A Brief History of Neoliberalism.David Harvey - 2005 - Oxford University Press.
Between past and future.Hannah Arendt - 1961 - New York,: Viking Press.
The life of the mind.Hannah Arendt - 1978 - New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Responsibility and judgment.Hannah Arendt - 2003 - New York: Schocken Books. Edited by Jerome Kohn.

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