Description:

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.

The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context....

Review

This critical edition of Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay "Toward the Critique of Violence" (Zur Kritik der Gewalt), edited and newly translated by Julia Ng with Peter Fenves, is far more than a new rendering of Benjamin's most consequential political essay. Published on the centenary of the original, it constitutes a comprehensive scholarly apparatus that transforms our understanding of the essay's genesis, intellectual context, and unrealized ambitions. The volume includes a new, fully annotated translation of Benjamin's essay; twenty-one associated notes and fragments; a previously unpublished bibliography Benjamin drafted for a "more fully developed critique of violence and philosophy of law"; an extensive introduction by Fenves and afterword by Ng; and newly translated passages from all contemporaneous sources Benjamin cites — Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Georges Sorel, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. The result is the definitive scholarly edition of a text whose influence on continental political theory — through Derrida, Agamben, Butler, and Hamacher, among others — has become immense.

Benjamin's Essay: The Central Argument

Benjamin's "Toward the Critique of Violence" opens with a series of deceptively simple "observations" that frame the entire investigation. Violence (Gewalt — a word that also encompasses "power," "force," and "authority") becomes violence "in the impressive sense of the word" only when it intervenes in moral relations, and the sphere of those relations is designated by the concepts of law and justice. The essay then suspends the question of just ends to focus on whether violent means can ever be justified as a principle — a move that allows Benjamin to bypass both natural law (which sees violence as a natural given) and positive law (which assesses violence only by its historical sanction) in search of a standpoint that transcends both.

The core of Benjamin's analysis distinguishes two functions of violence: law-positing (rechtsetzende) violence, which establishes new legal orders (as in the outcome of wars, or the revolutionary general strike), and law-preserving (rechtserhaltende) violence, which maintains existing ones (as in conscription, or the death penalty). The essay's most searing passage concerns the police, described as a "spectral mixture" of both functions — "law-positing, for its characteristic function is not the promulgation of laws but the adoption of any given decree with the claim to legality — and it is law-preserving because it places itself at the disposal of these ends." Benjamin argues that the police, whose violence is "shapeless" and "all-pervasive," reveals itself as "the greatest conceivable degeneration of power" precisely in democracies, where its existence is elevated by no relation to sovereign authority.

The essay then develops a crucial distinction between the "political general strike" (which merely transfers power from one set of privileged hands to another, remaining law-positing) and the "proletarian general strike" (which seeks to annihilate state power altogether and is therefore, paradoxically, nonviolent — a "pure means"). Drawing on Sorel's Reflections on Violence, Benjamin argues that this second kind of strike is anarchistic rather than law-positing: it does not seek external concessions but resolves to resume "only an entirely transformed work that is not compelled by the state."

The argument reaches its apex in the distinction between mythic and divine violence. Mythic violence — exemplified by Niobe's punishment by Apollo and Artemis — is law-positing: it establishes boundaries, inculpates and expiates simultaneously, and manifests fate. Divine violence — exemplified by God's judgment on Korah's horde — is law-annihilating: it "boundlessly annihilates" boundaries, "de-expiates" rather than inculpating, and strikes without threat. Where mythic violence is bloody, divine violence is "lethal in a bloodless manner." Benjamin's crucial claim is that "blood is the symbol of mere life," and it is over "mere life" that mythic-legal violence exercises its dominion.

The essay concludes with a philosophy of history: all law-preserving violence weakens law-positing violence over time, until new or suppressed forces break through and found "a new law, with a new decay." Breaking through this mythic cycle requires the "de-positing" of law together with all forms of violence on which it depends — and therefore the "de-positing" of state violence. Benjamin ends with the neologism waltende Gewalt — "pending violence" — a divine violence that is "the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch."

The Associated Notes and Fragments

The twenty-one associated notes and fragments constitute a rich intellectual hinterland for the essay. Fragment 1, "Notes toward a Work on the Category of Justice," establishes that justice "does not appear to refer to the good will of the subject but instead constitutes a state of the world" — a claim that grounds the essay's insistence on the radical disjunction between law and justice. Fragment 3, "From 'Life and Violence,'" argues that "original violence, as it may exist, for example, in self-defense, is not at all reprehensible" and that "the anarchistic demand that violence be abolished makes sense only in relation to expended violence" — the administered violence of the state.

Fragment 8, "Ethics, Applied to History," offers a remarkable schema: ethics applied to history is the doctrine of revolution; applied to the state, it is the doctrine of anarchy. Fragment 14, "The Meaning of Time in the Moral World," develops the distinction between retribution (which is "indifferent with respect to time") and forgiveness, which gains its "powerful shaping in time" — "God's wrath roars through history in the storm of forgiveness so as to sweep away what would otherwise be forever consumed in the lightning bolts of divine weather."

Perhaps most consequential is Fragment 18, "Capitalism as Religion," which argues that capitalism is "a pure cult religion, perhaps the most extreme that has ever existed." Three traits define it: everything has meaning only in immediate relation to the cult (no theology, no dogma); the cult is permanent, "sans trêve et sans merci"; and the cult is inculpating — "presumably the first case of a cult that does not de-expiate but rather inculpates." The expansion of despair into the religious world condition from which salvation is supposed to be expected — this is capitalism's historically unprecedented quality. Freud's theory "belongs also to the priestly dominion of this cult," as does Nietzsche's philosophy of the Übermensch.

Fragment 17, "The Right to Apply Force / Use Violence," most closely approximates the essay's argument. It presents four critical possibilities — denying violence to both state and individual, granting it unconditionally to both, granting it only to the state, or granting it only to the individual — and argues that the last position must be adopted "where it is seen that, on the one hand, there is no contradiction in principle between morals and violence and, on the other, there is a contradiction in principle between morals and the state." This is the position Benjamin aligns with anarchism, though specifically an anarchism that honors violence "in the individual case as a gift of divine power."

Fenves's Introduction

Peter Fenves's extensive introduction reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the essay's composition and publication with remarkable scholarly precision. He demonstrates that Benjamin initially conceived the essay for Die weißen Blätter (a literary journal of the younger generation) rather than the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (the scholarly journal where it ultimately appeared). Editor Emil Lederer rejected it for the literary journal on grounds of "length" and "difficulty," though Fenves suggests the real reason was substantive: Lederer's own "Sociology of Violence" — published in the slot originally reserved for Benjamin — defends a developmentalist position diametrically opposed to Benjamin's.

Fenves traces the essay's origin to a broader "Politics" project that Benjamin outlined in late 1920, comprising three parts: an introduction, "The True Politics" (divided into "The Dismantling of Violence" and "Teleology without Final Purpose"), and a philosophical critique of Scheerbart's science-fiction novel Lesabéndio. The project's Kantian lineage is carefully documented: the phrase "true politics" comes from Kant's Toward Eternal Peace, while "Teleology without Final Purpose" reworks Kant's "purposiveness without purpose" from the third Critique. By the winter of 1920/21, the project had transformed from a unified book into "a series of political essays," only two of which — "The True Politician" (now lost) and "Toward the Critique of Violence" — were completed. The aphoristic "third part" eventually became One-Way Street (1928).

Most illuminating is Fenves's analysis of the essay's opening "observations" as the skeleton of a transformed Kantian moral philosophy. Benjamin, he argues, treats violence as the inverse of freedom in its "transcendental" sense: where Kant's free agent intervenes in natural relations, Benjamin's violence intervenes in moral relations. The sphere of moral relations is "rigorously bipolar" — law and justice — without any mediating term, and this disjunction is what necessitates the critique. Fenves shows how Benjamin's concept of Entsühnung ("de-expiation") deliberately inverts the standard German usage in which sühnen and entsühnen are near-synonyms, making them instead strict antonyms congruent with the disjunction between law and justice.

Ng's Afterword

Julia Ng's afterword, "Toward Another Critique of Violence," is arguably the volume's most ambitious contribution to scholarship. Using the previously unpublished bibliography (Note 22) as her primary evidence, Ng demonstrates that Benjamin continued working on a "more fully developed critique of violence" well into the late 1920s. The bibliography, she shows, is precisely the kind of reading list one might produce for a postdoctoral degree in legal philosophy, ranging from Plato's Laws and Beccaria's On Crime and Punishment through the works of Stammler, Kelsen, and Schmitt.

Ng reconstructs how Benjamin encountered the Kelsen-Schmitt debate on constitutional guardianship. Kelsen's "On the Essence and Value of Democracy" — published in the same issue of the Archiv as Benjamin's essay — argued for the fictive character of legal equality and the necessity of parliamentary representation. Schmitt's Political Theology and Dictatorship argued conversely that sovereignty consists in the decision on the state of exception, and that law is always "situational law." Ng shows Benjamin reading Schmitt polemically as an aesthetic theory in Origin of the German Trauerspiel: where Schmitt declares "sovereign is he who decides over the state of exception," Benjamin discovers the tyrant's constitutive indecisiveness — the "sheer arbitrariness that decisionism implies" — and concludes that "the bureaucrat has become the sovereign."

The afterword's most provocative section concerns Benjamin's engagement with Kurt Latte's Heiliges Recht (Sacred Law), marked with an asterisk in his bibliography. Through Latte, Benjamin develops a theory of ancient law as proceeding not through judicial decision but through "expiatory negotiation" (Sühneverhandlung) — a dialogue seeking conciliation rather than determination of absolute right. Ng argues that Benjamin saw in this the historical counterpart to the "pure means" of discussion he describes in the essay, grounded not in written law but in religious forms and the juridical oath.

The Companion Texts

The companion texts — all newly translated — allow the reader to encounter for the first time in English the full constellation of arguments that Benjamin drew upon. The Sorel selections illuminate the crucial distinction between political and proletarian general strikes: the former "demonstrates how the state will lose none of its force, how power is transferred from the privileged to the privileged"; the latter "very clearly signals its indifference to the material profits of conquest by affirming that it aims to eliminate the state." Unger's selections from Politics and Metaphysics — which Benjamin called "the most significant piece of writing on politics in our time" — develop the psychophysical problem as a political question, arguing that the fabrication-causality binding the body into organic unity could, if consciously accessed, effectuate a "massive shift in the way that society is constructed." The vision is startling: a new "prophetic" figure whose heightened biological-spiritual power provides the "metaphysical-biological focus for a new social order."

Lederer's "Sociology of Violence" provides an essential counterpoint. Where Benjamin sees violence as the recurring fundament of legal structures, "always underpinning the making and unmaking of law and liable to erupt at any moment," Lederer argues that violence is structurally a thing of the past: capitalist economic mechanisms have rendered physical force "functionless" in the domain of social struggles. The contrast could not be sharper, and it explains why Lederer, while publishing the essay, may have arranged the Archiv's contents to neutralize its implications.

Assessment

The editorial apparatus is meticulous and illuminating. Ng's translation of Benjamin's essay is more inclined toward fidelity than accessibility, preserving the syntactic density and terminological precision of the German. The decision to render Entsühnung as "de-expiation" — rather than "atonement" or "purification" — is philologically rigorous and conceptually necessary, as Fenves's introduction demonstrates. The endnotes are comprehensive without being exhaustive, and the glossary provides invaluable guidance through the semantic field of Gewalt.

Where the volume is strongest is in its demonstration that Benjamin's essay was not, as many readers have assumed, a self-enclosed manifesto but rather a prolegomenon to a much larger project — one that would have included a philosophy of biology, a theory of the psychophysical problem, a decolonial critique of European legal philosophy, and a portrait of "the true politician." The previously unpublished bibliography makes this case irrefutably. Where the volume is necessarily weaker is in its inability to present the lost essays — "The True Politician," "Life and Violence," and the review of Bloch — that would have completed the picture.

The afterword occasionally asks more of its archival evidence than it can bear. Ng's argument that Benjamin intended a "decolonial philosophy of the history of violence" is suggestive but relies on indirect evidence — the dedication of an offprint to Benjamin's lecturer in Mesoamerican cultures, and the interpretation of a single aphorism in One-Way Street. The reconstruction of Benjamin's engagement with the Kelsen-Schmitt debate is more solidly grounded, though the claim that Benjamin read Schmitt as "secretly a legal positivist" is interpretively bold.

As a whole, this volume achieves something rare in scholarly editing: it makes an already-great text greater by restoring its intellectual ecology. The notes and fragments reveal a Benjamin whose "moral philosophy" — never completed, perhaps never completable — sought to hold together the disjunction of law and justice without resolving it, to think violence without instrumentalizing it, and to envision a "coming world" in which divine nonviolence would be "higher than divine violence." The companion texts reveal, in turn, how precarious this position was — how easily Sorel's "bloodless revolutions" could be appropriated by fascism (as Benjamin himself discovered in his 1927 interview with Georges Valois), how readily Unger's vitalist metaphysics could shade into the authoritarian, how naturally Lederer's liberal developmentalism could dismiss the entire problematic. The volume's greatest achievement is to show that Benjamin understood all of these dangers — and pressed forward regardless, toward a critique of violence that remains, a century later, still "pending."

Reviewed 2026-05-12

Notable Quotes

The task of a critique of violence may be described as the presentation of its relation to law and justice. For however effective a cause may be, it becomes violence in the impressive sense of the word only when it intervenes in moral relations.

Opening sentence of Benjamin's essay, defining the scope and method of the critique — violence, law, justice, moral philosophy

One would perhaps have to consider the surprising possibility that law's interest in monopolizing violence vis-à-vis the individual is explained by the intention not of preserving legal ends, but rather of preserving law itself.

Benjamin's analysis of why the state fears individual violence regardless of its ends — state power, law, monopoly on violence

In a far more unnatural combination than in the death penalty, in a spectral mixture, so to speak, these two kinds of violence are present in another institution of the modern state: the police.

Benjamin's critique of the police as combining law-positing and law-preserving violence — police, state violence, law

The violence of this institution is shapeless, like its nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly appearance in the life of civilized states.

Characterization of police violence as formless and omnipresent — police, state power, surveillance

Every compromise is a product situated within the mentality of violence, no matter how much it may disdain all open violence, because the effort toward compromise is motivated not internally but from outside, indeed by the opposing effort.

Unger's formulation, cited by Benjamin, on the inherently violent character of political compromise — compromise, violence, politics

If mythic violence is law-positing, divine violence is law-annihilating; if the former establishes boundaries, the latter boundlessly annihilates them; if mythic violence inculpates and expiates at the same time, divine violence de-expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal in a bloodless manner.

The central antithesis of the essay, distinguishing mythic from divine violence — mythic violence, divine violence, law, justice

For blood is the symbol of mere life.

Benjamin's transformation of the Levitical principle that 'the life of the flesh is in the blood' into a modern philosophical claim — life, violence, symbolism, sacrifice

The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history. The 'philosophy' of this history because only the idea of its ending makes possible a critical, incisive, and decisive attitude toward its temporal data.

Opening of the essay's final section, defining critique as philosophy of history — philosophy of history, critique, violence

Justice does not appear to refer to the good will of the subject but instead constitutes a state of the world. Justice designates the ethical category of the existent, virtue the ethical category of the demanded.

Fragment 1, 'Notes toward a Work on the Category of Justice,' distinguishing justice from virtue — justice, ethics, virtue, moral philosophy

Ethics, applied to history, is the doctrine of revolution. Applied to the state, it is the doctrine of anarchy.

Fragment 8, one of Benjamin's most compressed formulations of his political philosophy — ethics, revolution, anarchy, state

Capitalism is a pure cult religion, perhaps the most extreme that has ever existed. In capitalism, everything has meaning only immediately in relation to the cult; it knows no special dogmatics, no theology.

Fragment 18, 'Capitalism as Religion,' identifying capitalism as a permanent, inculpating cult — capitalism, religion, cult, guilt

A religion is to be seen in capitalism; that is, capitalism essentially pacifies the same cares, agonies, unrest to which in earlier times so-called religions gave answers.

Opening of the 'Capitalism as Religion' fragment — capitalism, religion, modernity

The transcendence of God has fallen. But he is not dead; he has been drawn into human fate. This passage of the planet 'human' through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of its path is the ethos defining Nietzsche.

Benjamin's interpretation of Nietzsche's Übermensch as a figure of capitalist religion — God, Nietzsche, capitalism, despair

The anarchistic demand that violence be abolished makes sense only in relation to expended violence; therefore, its terroristic praxis does not stand in contradiction with its theory.

Fragment 3, 'From Life and Violence,' distinguishing original from administered violence — anarchism, violence, state

God's wrath roars through history in the storm of forgiveness so as to sweep away what would otherwise be forever consumed in the lightning bolts of divine weather.

Fragment 14, on the meaning of time in the moral world, distinguishing forgiveness from retribution — forgiveness, time, divine judgment, moral world

In the best of circumstances, 'economy' means: a compromise of opposed forces. But the appeal to a merely intellectual or historical or remote generative source of unity, one that might resolve this conflict, is bound to ring hollow and fail of its purpose if the real unity, the totality of the most intense, theoretical-concrete interests, has been lost.

Unger's Politics and Metaphysics, on why economic compromise cannot achieve ethical normativity — economy, compromise, unity, politics

Violence will be an effective means in social life—and the order of personal, interhuman, and social relations will play themselves out within the framework of power relations—only for as long as the general circumstances of life can be successfully extended, expanded, and secured by the application of force and the use of violence.

Lederer's thesis that violence has become structurally obsolete under capitalism — violence, capitalism, social structure, power

The proletarian general strike sets itself the sole task of annihilating state power. It suspends all ideological consequences of every possible social policy; its partisans regard even the most popular reforms as bourgeois.

Benjamin's translation of Sorel on the proletarian general strike as pure means — general strike, revolution, state power, pure means

Sovereign is he who decides over the state of exception.

Schmitt's famous formulation, discussed extensively in Ng's afterword on the Kelsen-Schmitt debate — sovereignty, state of exception, decisionism, constitutional law

The true politician reckons only in target dates.

From One-Way Street, the only surviving trace of Benjamin's lost essay 'The True Politician' — politics, time, action