Abstract

This project examines, from the perspective of modern political theory and through the lens of punishment, the relationship between politics and violence. The inquiry is motivated to a significant degree by an interest in the political consequences of human corporeality. Accordingly, "violence" here refers to actions that take advantage of the physical vulnerabilities or limitations of the human body. Such actions are not usually included within accounts of politics, especially those articulated by liberal thinkers. One reason to focus on punishment is its regularization, institutionalization, and seeming inevitability. More than war, more than riots or rebellions, punishment is a familiar and expected institution in almost any political system. Punishment, in other words, may be the most political of violences. ;To study the roles of violence in politics---specifically, in contemporary liberal politics---I rely primarily upon Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Arendt. Each of these thinkers offers an explicitly political inquiry into violence; each is unsqueamish and unsentimental about political violence. Violence for Machiavelli and Hobbes is a matter of political fact, and though Arendt denies violence a place in authentic politics, she is quick to recognize its importance to politics-as-we-know-it. Machiavelli and Hobbes each depcit a close connection between violent punishment and the foundation or preservation of political authority. Their accounts of the relationship between violent punishment and authority call into question liberalism's attempt to rationalize political authority, or to make political authority a matter of reasoned consent. Although Arendt imagines an alternative form of political authority which does not rely on violence, her vision of politics is unstable and probably unsustainable. In any political system that relies on subjects' deference to or respect for authority , there is reason to doubt that government activity will not sometimes involve actions against the physical bodies of disobedient subjects. Politics cannot operate at a wholly intangible level; it depends on at least some moments of concretization. Instances of violent punishment, as such moments of concretization, help close a gap that reason leaves open