Toward the Critique of Violence

A Critical Edition

Walter Benjamin, Peter Fenves, Julia Ng

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780804749534, 9780804749527
• eBook ISBN: 9781503627680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

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.

With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Frontispiece
• Contents
• Note on the Translation of Benjamin’s Writings
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Introduction
• “Toward the Critique of Violence”
• Associated Notes and Fragments
• 1. Notes toward a Work on the Category of Justice
• 2. Vivification and Violence
• 3. From “Life and Violence”
• 4. On Morality
• 5. All Unconditionality of the Will Leads to Evil
• 6. On Kantian Ethics
• 7. The Spontaneity of the I
• 8. Ethics, Applied to History
• 9. Modes of History
• 10. Methodical Modes of History
• 11. Death
• 12. As Many Pagan Religions, So Many Natural Concepts of Guilt
• 13. On the Problem of Physiognomy and Prediction
• 14. The Meaning of Time in the Moral World
• 15. 1) World and Time
• 16. Morality, Ethics
• 17. The Right to Apply Force / Use Violence
• 18. Capitalism as Religion
• 19. Notes on “Objective Mendacity” I
• 20. Notes toward a Work on Lying II
• 21. Schemata for the Psychophysical Problem
• 22. Literature for a More Fully Developed Critique of Violence and Philosophy of Law
• 22. Literatur zu einer ausgeführteren Kritik der Gewalt und zur Rechtsphilosophie
• Afterword: Toward Another Critique of Violence
• Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Pure Will
• Kurt Hiller, “Anti-Cain: A Postscript to Rudolf Leonhard’s ‘Our Final Battle against Weapons’”
• Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence
• Erich Unger, from Politics and Metaphysics
• Emil Lederer, “Sociology of Violence: A Contribution to the Theory of Social-Formative Forces”
• Glossary
• Notes
• Note on the Translators
• Index