Power and Violence: Hannah Arendt on Authority, Collective Action, and Coercion
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 24, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Hannah Arendt’s account of power begins from a deliberately unusual premise: political power is not primarily a possession, a weapon, a rank, or a capacity one individual stores and deploys against another. It arises when people act together and continues only while that collective capacity is sustained. In her mature political theory, especially The Human Condition and the essay later published as On Violence, power belongs to plurality and coordinated action. Violence belongs to a different conceptual family: it is instrumental, means-end oriented, and dependent on tools, force, or coercive means. The distinction is central to Arendt’s theory of action and power and remains one of the most influential attempts to separate collective political capacity from domination.
That framework is a historical and philosophical theory, not an experimentally validated law of social psychology. Modern psychology uses power, authority, legitimacy, coercion, obedience, agency, and collective action as partly overlapping but separately measured constructs. This article therefore does two things at once: it reconstructs Arendt’s own distinctions from her primary texts and scholarly interpretations, then asks what contemporary psychological research can legitimately add. Readers looking for the broader empirical construct of social power or the cluster-wide overview of the psychology of power can follow those canonical articles; the present article owns the Arendt-specific question of power, violence, authority, collective action, and coercion.
What Does Hannah Arendt Mean by Power?
For Arendt, power is the human capacity to act together. The compact formula commonly associated with her is the ability to “act in concert.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s reconstruction of Arendt emphasizes that this power is not an individual attribute analogous to physical strength. It comes into being among a plurality of people who coordinate around a public purpose, and it persists only as long as the group remains capable of acting together.
This makes Arendt’s use of the word power markedly different from ordinary speech and from much of social psychology. In everyday language, an executive, ruler, manager, or wealthy person may be described as powerful because that individual controls resources, offices, sanctions, information, or access. Arendt would redirect attention from the individual to the network of support that makes coordinated action possible. An officeholder can be “in power” because others authorize, support, implement, recognize, or cooperate with the officeholder’s actions. The visible individual is therefore only one point in a collective configuration of action.
The idea is already rooted in The Human Condition, where action is bound to plurality and the public realm. Human beings disclose themselves and initiate processes through speech and action with others. Power is the capacity generated by this togetherness. It is consequently fragile in a distinctive way: a weapon can remain stored when unused, but Arendtian power cannot simply be warehoused. It exists in enactment, coordination, mutual recognition, and continuing association.
Power Is Not the Same as Domination
A major reason Arendt’s theory can be confusing is that many traditions define power through asymmetry: A has power over B when A can alter B’s behavior, resources, opportunities, or outcomes, including against B’s preferences. That family of definitions is important in sociology and psychology, and it is treated directly in the Hub’s Social Power article. Arendt is asking a different question. She wants a concept for the capacity that appears when people create a public world through concerted action.
Her distinction therefore changes the grammar of the problem. Instead of beginning with “Who makes whom do what?”, she begins with “What becomes possible when people act together?” This shift does not deny that domination, hierarchy, command, or resource control exist. It assigns them different concepts. A hierarchical organization may possess extensive social power in the conventional psychological sense while also depending, in Arendt’s sense, on the continuing cooperation of the people who make the organization function.
This is also why Arendt cannot simply be inserted into a standard list of “types of power.” French and Raven’s bases of social power, including reward power resource dependence approaches, status research, and Arendtian political power answer different analytical questions. Combining them without qualification would create a false equivalence. Arendt is reconstructing the ontology of political action; experimental social psychology is usually operationalizing influence, dependence, control, status, or behavior.
What Does Arendt Mean by Violence?
Arendt treats violence as instrumental. In her 1969 primary essay “Reflections on Violence”, which preceded the book On Violence, she distinguishes power from violence precisely because violence operates through means directed toward an end. Weapons are the clearest example: they magnify physical force and can compel, injure, destroy, restrain, or threaten. Violence can therefore produce immediate effects that collective agreement cannot produce in the same way.
The distinction is analytical rather than a claim that power and violence never appear in the same historical situation. Arendt explicitly recognizes that they frequently coexist. Governments, movements, institutions, and conflicts may combine collective support with coercive means. Her claim concerns what each phenomenon is doing. Power rests on organized human support; violence relies on instruments and coercive capacity. A government can possess both, but one should not infer from the presence of armed force that the force itself is the source of political power.
This leads to one of Arendt’s most famous asymmetries. Violence can damage or destroy the relationships from which power emerges, yet violence by itself cannot generate the shared capacity she calls power. That is a philosophical claim about political foundations, not a laboratory finding. It becomes empirically interesting when translated into narrower questions about legitimacy, compliance, collective identification, efficacy, coercion, and perceived agency.
Power and Violence Are Distinct, but Their Relationship Is Not Simple
A simplified reading of Arendt says that power is good, violence is bad, and the two are opposites. The scholarship is more complicated. Arendt’s conceptual separation is sharp, but her historical analyses recognize political situations in which power and violence are entangled. André Duarte’s analysis argues that the distinctions should be read relationally rather than as sealed categories that never meet. Violence may occur inside revolutionary or political processes while still remaining conceptually different from the collective action that generates power.
Caroline Ashcroft develops a related revision in Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt. Ashcroft argues that Arendt is often misread as excluding violence from politics in an absolute way. On this interpretation, Arendt’s deeper objection is to making violent force constitutive of politics—to treating coercive force as the source that creates political order. That reading preserves the distinction while allowing a more historically realistic account of how violence can accompany political action.
Other scholars remain critical. Keith Breen’s critique argues that Arendt’s separation of power and violence makes politics appear too cleanly detached from hostility and coercion. This disagreement matters because the Arendtian distinction is a contested theoretical proposal. It is influential, conceptually productive, and historically grounded, yet it is not the only defensible account of power.
Authority in Arendt: Recognition Without Constant Force
Authority is another separate category in Arendt’s vocabulary. Her 1956 essay “Authority in the Twentieth Century” and the later essay “What Is Authority?” collected in Between Past and Future examine the erosion of inherited forms of authority in modern political life. Authority, in this tradition, depends on recognized standing. It does not require continuous persuasion between equals, and it loses its specific character when commands must be maintained by sheer force.
This does not make Arendt’s authority identical to contemporary psychological legitimacy. The concepts overlap around recognition and accepted entitlement, but they belong to different theoretical systems. Contemporary psychology often treats legitimacy as a belief that an authority, institution, or social arrangement is appropriate and entitled to deference. Tom Tyler’s major review of psychological legitimacy summarizes evidence that legitimacy supports voluntary compliance because people feel an obligation to accept decisions rather than responding only to expected punishment or reward.
The cleanest way to keep the terms separate is to treat authority as a recognized claim to direct, legitimacy as a psychological judgment that such authority is proper or entitled, power as a capacity to shape action or outcomes, and coercion as pressure that narrows choice through threatened or actual adverse consequences. The detailed comparison belongs to Power vs Authority and the broader psychological construct belongs to Authority in Psychology. Arendt’s distinctive contribution is to show why recognized authority and collective power should not be collapsed into violence.
Authority, Legitimacy, and the Social Psychology of Voluntary Compliance
Modern legitimacy research gives an empirical language for a question close to Arendt’s concern: why do institutions often obtain cooperation without relying continuously on force? Tyler’s 2006 review defines legitimacy as a psychological property that leads people to view an authority or arrangement as appropriate and to feel that they ought to defer to it. A later 2023 review of legal authority and legitimacy examines the continuing importance of legitimacy-based governance under conditions of declining institutional trust.
Sociological social-psychological work also shows that legitimacy is produced through social processes rather than residing magically inside an office or title. Johnson, Dowd, and Ridgeway’s review analyzes legitimation across interpersonal and organizational levels. Taken together, this literature supports a mechanism-level distinction between compliance grounded in accepted entitlement and compliance grounded mainly in threats or incentives.
The parallel with Arendt is real but limited. Arendt’s power is a political-philosophical capacity generated through common action; legitimacy research studies judgments, obligations, procedures, and behavioral cooperation using empirical methods. The theories become most useful together when each keeps its own status. Arendt tells us what kind of political phenomenon she wants the word power to name. Psychology asks which perceptions and social mechanisms make people cooperate with, resist, or withdraw support from authorities.
Collective Action: Where Arendt Meets Contemporary Psychology
Arendt’s theory makes collective action constitutive of power. Contemporary social psychology also studies collective action, but as an empirical outcome with identifiable predictors. The two uses should be connected carefully. Arendt’s “acting in concert” names a political capacity and a mode of public action. Psychological collective-action research asks why people participate in protests, movements, solidarity actions, campaigns, and other group-based efforts.
A foundational meta-analysis by van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears synthesized 182 effects and found that social identity, perceived injustice, and collective efficacy each contributed to collective action. A much larger 2021 quantitative synthesis by Agostini and van Zomeren integrated 1,235 effects from 403 samples with 123,707 participants and found unique positive contributions from identity, injustice, efficacy, and morality. These findings give contemporary empirical substance to the psychological conditions that can mobilize coordinated group action.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analytic integration likewise found that collective behavior and social-movement participation are associated with identity, efficacy, injustice-related emotions, moral conviction, threat, and goal agreement across diverse research traditions. Importantly, the review also challenges older crowd stereotypes: collective behavior is not inherently unanimous, irrational, or violent. This is highly relevant to Arendt because her category of collective action should not be confused with undifferentiated mass behavior.
Still, psychological collective action is broader than Arendtian power. A coordinated group can engage in collective action for many ends, through many mechanisms, and sometimes through violent means. Empirical research classifies behavior by observable group action and motivation; Arendt classifies political phenomena by their underlying mode of action and relation to plurality. The overlap is therefore strongest around coordination, shared identification, efficacy, and sustained participation, not around a claim that every crowd or movement instantiates Arendt’s concept of power.
Coercion Is Not Identical to Violence
The word coercion requires special care because Arendt’s violence and psychology’s coercion are not interchangeable. Arendt’s analysis of violence emphasizes instrumental force and the means by which force is multiplied. Psychological research can define coercion more broadly, including threats, commands under pressure, constrained alternatives, or situations in which refusal carries serious costs. A coercive interaction can therefore be psychologically consequential without involving physical violence.
This distinction matters for the title of this article. Arendt helps separate collective power from rule through violence; psychology helps examine what coercive pressure does to decision-making, agency, compliance, and responsibility. The two literatures illuminate adjacent layers of the same problem while retaining different concepts.
What Coercion Can Do to the Sense of Agency
Experimental work on coercion provides one of the clearest psychological bridges to Arendt’s concern with action. In a 2016 Current Biology experiment by Caspar and colleagues, participants who acted under coercive orders showed a reduced implicit sense of agency over the consequences of their actions compared with freely chosen actions. The study combined subjective and neural measures with a paradigm inspired by obedience research.
Patrick Haggard’s review of the neuroscience of agency places this result within a broader literature on how people experience control over their own actions and outcomes. Sense of agency is a psychological and neurocognitive experience; it is not a legal verdict and it does not automatically determine moral responsibility. A person can experience diminished agency under pressure while still having some capacity for choice, judgment, or resistance.
That distinction is especially important when Arendt is discussed alongside obedience research. Arendt’s political theory places enormous weight on action, judgment, plurality, and responsibility. Experimental findings about reduced subjective agency under coercion can help explain one psychological mechanism of constrained action, but they cannot settle the philosophical or moral question of responsibility by themselves. The Hub treats responsibility as its own canonical topic in Power and Responsibility.
Arendt, Obedience, and the Milgram Problem
Arendt is often placed next to Stanley Milgram because both became associated with twentieth-century questions about authority, obedience, and harmful action. That pairing can be illuminating, but the popular story that Arendt and Milgram jointly proved that ordinary people blindly obey authority is historically and theoretically misleading.
Johannes Lang’s 2014 analysis of Arendt and social-psychological explanations of mass atrocity argues that the standard convergence between Arendt, Milgram, and situationist explanations rests on a selective reading of Arendt. Her work preserves questions of judgment and responsibility that disappear when harmful conduct is explained simply as automatic obedience to a powerful situation.
Milgram’s own experiments have also been reinterpreted. In their 2017 Annual Review, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher review methodological and interpretive debates and argue that participants’ behavior is better understood through identification and “engaged followership” than through a model of blind conformity alone. This does not erase obedience as a phenomenon; it changes the proposed mechanism and cautions against making one experiment stand for all relations between authority and harmful action.
For the full experimental and historical discussion, see Obedience to Authority and the dedicated Stanley Milgram Experiment article. The Arendt article has a narrower task: it shows why obedience, authority, power, violence, and responsibility remain conceptually distinct even when they occur in the same event.
When Support Disappears: An Arendtian View of Political Fragility
If power exists through collective support, then withdrawal of support is theoretically decisive. Arendt repeatedly emphasizes that command structures ultimately depend on people who continue to recognize, administer, obey, or enact them. A government or organization may possess instruments of violence, but those instruments still require operators, supply systems, coordination, and institutional cooperation. Her conceptual point is that the capacity to act collectively cannot be reduced to the material capacity to coerce.
Psychology approaches resistance from other directions. People may resist when autonomy is threatened, when authority is seen as illegitimate, when moral conviction outweighs compliance motives, when group identities shift, or when collective efficacy rises. These mechanisms are treated in the Hub’s Why Do People Resist Authority? article. They are not translations of Arendt, but they help explain the micro-level processes through which support, compliance, and dissent can change.
This is also where the difference between power and mere control becomes useful. An institution may still be able to constrain behavior after losing legitimacy. A coercive actor may still be able to impose severe costs after losing voluntary cooperation. In Arendt’s vocabulary, those residual capacities should not automatically be counted as the same phenomenon as collective power. In psychological vocabulary, they may still constitute social power, control, coercion, or dependence. The vocabulary chosen determines which mechanism comes into focus.
Can Violence Create Power?
Arendt’s answer is conceptually restrictive: violence can clear obstacles, destroy institutions, defeat opponents, or alter the conditions under which people act, but it cannot by itself create the durable collective support she calls power. A violent seizure of an institution may change who controls instruments of force. Whether a new political order develops power in Arendt’s sense depends on what forms of association, authorization, participation, and collective action emerge afterward.
This claim should be read as part of her philosophy of politics, not as a universal empirical prediction that violent organizations always collapse or that nonviolent groups always prevail. Historical outcomes depend on resources, organization, institutions, military capacity, external support, ideology, fear, legitimacy, and many other factors. Arendt’s contribution is to insist that control over violence and the existence of political power answer different questions.
That distinction also prevents a common conceptual shortcut: success in coercing behavior is not evidence that the target regards the coercer as legitimate, and a compliant response is not proof of authority. Someone can comply because resistance is costly, because a threat is credible, because a command feels legitimate, because the group identifies with a leader, or because several motives operate simultaneously. Psychology tries to identify those mechanisms rather than infer them from compliance alone.
Can Power Exist Without Violence?
Within Arendt’s framework, yes. Indeed, the possibility of collective political action without violence is central to the distinctiveness of power. Public deliberation, coordinated civic action, institution-building, councils, assemblies, strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of organized participation can generate collective capacity without physical coercion. The empirical psychology of collective action supports the broader point that coordinated action can be mobilized through identity, efficacy, perceived injustice, and moral conviction rather than through violence.
Yet the absence of violence does not make a group automatically legitimate, democratic, benevolent, or psychologically healthy. Collective power can be exclusionary, majoritarian, coercive through social means, or directed toward harmful goals. Arendt herself distinguishes power from moral goodness. The analytical gain is that researchers can ask separately whether a group has collective capacity, whether an authority is regarded as legitimate, whether coercion is occurring, whether violence is used, and what goals the group pursues.
Power, Authority, Status, Influence, Control, and Coercion
Arendt’s vocabulary becomes most useful when it disciplines adjacent concepts. Power, authority, status, influence, control, and coercion can all shape behavior, yet each points to a different relation. Social power concerns capacity to affect outcomes or others. Authority concerns a recognized entitlement to direct or decide. Status concerns prestige or social standing. Influence is the broader process by which beliefs or behavior change. Control concerns command over resources, options, constraints, or outcomes. Coercion concerns pressure that restricts meaningful choice through threats, force, or costly consequences.
Violence is narrower than this entire family. Physical force or its instrumental extension can be coercive, but coercion can also occur through nonphysical threats. Authority can produce obedience without coercion. Status can create influence without formal authority. Social power can exist without violence and without legitimacy. These distinctions are why the Hub gives separate canonical ownership to Power vs Authority, authority, obedience, and the separate bases of social power.
The Psychological Value of Arendt’s Distinction
Arendt does not offer a psychological scale for measuring power and violence, and her theory should not be presented as though it were a validated causal model. Its value for psychology is conceptual. It forces the analyst to ask what mechanism is actually producing coordinated behavior. Is the observed capacity coming from shared identification and collective efficacy? From accepted authority? From dependence on resources? From incentives? From threats? From physical force? From reputation and status? From fear? From internalized obligation?
That mechanism-first approach guards against a recurring error in the study of power: treating every successful influence attempt as evidence of the same underlying thing. Two people may perform the same outward behavior while the psychological process is entirely different. One may comply because a rule feels legitimate; another because refusal risks punishment; another because a respected group endorses the action; another because the person identifies with the goal; another because alternatives have been structurally removed.
Arendt’s concepts can therefore function as a theoretical lens beside empirical psychology, provided their evidentiary status remains explicit. Historical political theory clarifies distinctions. Psychological experiments and meta-analyses test narrower mechanisms. The result is stronger when neither is forced to impersonate the other.
Common Misreadings of Hannah Arendt on Power and Violence
One misreading treats Arendt as saying that violence never accompanies power. Her primary essay says the opposite: power and violence often appear together. The distinction concerns their sources and functions. Another misreading says that any collective action is automatically power in Arendt’s full political sense. Her theory ties power to plurality, public action, and the maintenance of a common world, which is more demanding than mere coordination.
A third misreading equates authority with power plus legitimacy. That formula may be useful in some modern social-scientific models, but it does not reproduce Arendt’s historical account of authority. A fourth misreading equates coercion with violence. Psychological coercion can occur through threats or restricted choice without physical force. A fifth misreading assumes that reduced sense of agency under coercion means absence of responsibility. Experimental agency measures describe subjective and neurocognitive processes; responsibility requires additional moral, legal, and contextual analysis.
A final misreading merges Arendt’s account with Milgram’s classic obedience interpretation. Contemporary scholarship on both Arendt and Milgram is more differentiated. Arendt’s work emphasizes judgment, responsibility, and action; current obedience scholarship debates identification, engagement, legitimacy, and the social meaning of commands. Their intersection is intellectually productive precisely because they do not say the same thing.
How to Apply the Framework to a Real Power Relationship
A useful Arendt-informed analysis starts by identifying the source of capacity. If people are acting together because they recognize a shared project and coordinate around it, an Arendtian form of power may be present. If behavior is produced by a recognized right to direct, authority is central. If behavior changes because refusal brings threatened harm or loss, coercion is central. If physical force or instrumental means are used to compel or destroy, violence is present. If outcomes depend on access to scarce resources, conventional social power or dependence may better describe the mechanism.
The second step is to identify what sustains the relation. Shared identity, legitimacy, efficacy, norms, institutional routines, fear, incentives, resource dependence, and expectations can all stabilize behavior. The third step is to ask how much genuine choice remains and how participants experience their own agency. The fourth is to distinguish immediate compliance from durable support. A command can succeed once without generating legitimacy, and a threat can alter behavior without producing the collective capacity Arendt calls power.
This approach is descriptive rather than a political scorecard. It does not decide which authority should be supported or which collective goal is desirable. It gives readers a more precise vocabulary for identifying the social and psychological processes operating in a situation.
Why Arendt Still Matters to the Psychology of Power
Arendt remains useful because the psychology of power is vulnerable to conceptual compression. Power can mean control over resources, ability to impose costs, personal autonomy, perceived influence, authority, status, dominance, leadership, or collective efficacy depending on the research tradition. Her work is a reminder that one word may conceal multiple mechanisms.
Her most important contribution to this cluster is the proposition that collective capacity deserves a concept separate from coercive force. Modern evidence on legitimacy shows why voluntary deference can differ psychologically from compliance under threat. Collective-action research identifies identity, injustice, efficacy, and morality as recurring predictors of coordinated action. Agency research shows that coercive orders can alter the subjective experience of authorship over action. None of these findings empirically proves Arendt’s political philosophy, yet each clarifies a neighboring mechanism that her distinctions make easier to see.
That is the productive meeting point between Arendt and psychology: not a retroactive claim that a twentieth-century political theorist anticipated every modern experiment, but a disciplined comparison between distinct conceptual levels. Arendt supplies a theory of political action, plurality, authority, and violence. Psychology supplies testable models of legitimacy, collective motivation, coercion, obedience, agency, and resistance. Together they reveal why the phrase “who has power?” is often less informative than the questions “what kind of power is operating, through which mechanism, and what keeps it in existence?”
Strength, Force, Authority, Power, and Violence: Arendt’s Five-Way Distinction
Arendt’s argument becomes clearer when the full vocabulary is restored. In On Violence and its 1969 essay version, she separates power, strength, force, authority, and violence because each names a different structure of action. Everyday language often treats these words as a sliding scale from mild influence to extreme compulsion. Arendt instead gives them different sources. Power is collective; strength belongs to an individual entity; force names energies or processes that are better understood as impersonal or circumstantial; authority depends on recognized standing; violence is instrumental and multiplies force through tools or organized means.
Strength is closest to an individual capacity. A person can be physically strong, intellectually formidable, resilient, wealthy, skilled, or unusually capable without thereby possessing Arendtian power. Individual strength may matter politically, but power begins only when plurality becomes organized action. This prevents the charisma or competence of one visible leader from being mistaken for the total source of a movement’s capacity. The leader’s individual qualities and the group’s collective power can interact, yet they remain analytically separable.
Authority differs again. Arendt’s historical analysis of authority is concerned with relationships in which recognized standing makes command possible without the continuous use of force or persuasion. Authority can attach to persons, offices, laws, institutions, or traditions depending on the historical context. Once an actor must repeatedly prove every command through argument, bribery, threat, or violence, the specific relation of authority has been weakened or displaced by another mechanism.
Violence is distinctive because of its instrumental logic. A weapon, detention mechanism, physical restraint, or organized capacity to inflict harm can produce compliance without creating shared purpose. Modern psychology would widen the analysis by adding nonphysical coercion, incentives, dependence, status, social identity, and legitimacy. Arendt’s five-way distinction therefore should not be treated as a complete taxonomy of every psychological influence process. Its value lies in showing why material force, individual strength, collective capacity, and recognized authority cannot be inferred from one another.
Plurality, Speech, and the Public Space of Power
The deeper foundation of Arendtian power is plurality. In The Human Condition, action matters because human beings appear to one another as distinct persons who can begin something new together. Political power is therefore connected to a public space in which people speak, respond, promise, organize, contest, deliberate, and initiate. The space need not be a literal town square. It is a relational space created whenever people become mutually visible as participants in a common affair.
This helps explain why Arendt’s idea of collective power is richer than numerical aggregation. A million isolated individuals who privately hold the same opinion do not automatically constitute power in her sense. Collective capacity emerges when opinions become organized through communication, association, commitment, and coordinated action. Numbers matter because collective support matters, but the mechanism is relational rather than merely statistical.
The distinction also separates collective action from unanimity. Plurality means difference persists inside the group. People can disagree over strategy, reasons, identity, interpretation, and desired outcomes while still sustaining a common capacity to act. Contemporary collective-action research is compatible with this limited point because group identification predicts action without implying complete cognitive or emotional uniformity. A movement can coordinate while remaining internally diverse.
Arendt’s emphasis on speech and appearance gives a further reason violence cannot substitute for power. Violence can silence, remove, immobilize, or destroy participants. It can alter the conditions of action, sometimes decisively. Yet those capacities are different from creating the communicative and organizational relations through which a plurality generates common action. This is a conceptual claim about the architecture of politics; psychology can investigate parts of that architecture through group identification, communication, efficacy, trust, legitimacy, and perceived agency.
Institutions, Organization, and Material Capacity
Arendt’s distinction does not imply that institutions can function on goodwill alone. Organizations require rules, roles, buildings, records, budgets, technologies, logistics, enforcement capacities, and durable procedures. Her point is that these material and administrative structures become politically effective through organized human participation. A legal text does not implement itself. A police organization does not act without personnel. A bureaucracy does not process decisions without coordinated routines. Even highly centralized systems depend on distributed acts of recognition and execution.
This is where Arendt’s theory intersects with a basic organizational insight: visible command depends on less visible cooperation. Some cooperation is voluntary, some habitual, some norm-governed, some incentive-based, and some coerced. Psychology and sociology can separate those mechanisms. Arendt’s contribution is to prevent the analyst from assuming that because an organization possesses instruments of coercion, coercion is the whole explanation for its capacity.
The distinction is especially useful when an institution remains materially powerful while its legitimacy declines. It may retain money, weapons, offices, information systems, legal authority, or control over access. Those resources can preserve considerable social power in the conventional sense. Arendt would nevertheless ask whether the institution still commands the collective support through which political power is reproduced. That question should be treated as a theoretical lens, not as a shortcut for predicting whether an institution will survive.
Violence, Terror, and the Destruction of Plurality
Arendt’s analysis becomes most severe when violence is organized to destroy the conditions of collective action themselves. In her political thought, terror is connected to the destruction of plurality, spontaneity, association, and the spaces in which people can appear and act together. Violence here is not merely an isolated harmful act. It becomes a method for preventing independent organization and breaking the relationships from which alternative power might arise.
This historical-philosophical argument should be distinguished from contemporary clinical uses of words such as trauma or terror. Arendt is analyzing political structures, not diagnosing individual victims. The relevant bridge to psychology lies in more specific processes: fear can alter behavior, threats can constrain choice, coercion can reduce experienced agency, and social isolation can undermine collective organization. Each of those claims requires its own empirical evidence rather than being derived automatically from Arendt.
Recent Arendt scholarship also resists reading the relation between violence and politics as mechanically binary. Ashcroft’s 2021 study argues that Arendt’s corpus allows a more complex account of political violence than the slogan “violence is outside politics” suggests. The stronger formulation is that violence cannot be the constitutive source of participatory political power. It may accompany, interrupt, defend, destroy, or transform political processes without becoming identical to the collective capacity those processes generate.
Where the Translation from Arendt to Psychology Reaches Its Limit
The most tempting error in interdisciplinary writing is to turn conceptual resemblance into empirical confirmation. Arendt writes that power emerges through acting together; collective-action studies find associations among identity, efficacy, injustice, morality, and participation. These results make a psychologically informed dialogue possible, but they do not operationalize Arendt’s complete concept. A participant endorsing protest intentions on a survey is not automatically measuring Arendtian power, and a laboratory manipulation of power is usually not a test of her political theory.
The same caution applies to legitimacy. Arendt’s authority and modern psychological legitimacy overlap around recognition, accepted entitlement, and noncoercive deference. Yet Tyler’s legitimacy research has its own definitions, measures, populations, and causal questions. Treating the terms as exact equivalents would erase differences in level of analysis: historical-political categories on one side, empirically operationalized psychological judgments on the other.
Coercion creates a third translation problem. Arendt’s violence is strongly tied to instrumental force, while psychological coercion can include commands backed by threatened costs without physical violence. The Caspar experiments therefore illuminate how coerced action can alter the sense of agency; they do not directly validate Arendt’s account of violence. Their importance here is narrower and stronger: they show that the subjective experience of authorship changes when action is performed under coercive instruction.
Keeping these boundaries intact improves both traditions. Arendt remains Arendt rather than becoming an honorary experimental psychologist, and empirical psychology remains accountable to measurable constructs rather than borrowing philosophical authority. The result is an interdisciplinary article in which historical theory, contemporary psychological constructs, and empirical evidence can genuinely inform one another because their statuses are explicit.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hannah Arendt’s definition of power?
Arendt defines power as a collective capacity that arises when people act together. It belongs to a group rather than to an isolated individual and lasts only while the group remains capable of concerted action. Her account of action and power is rooted in plurality, public action, speech, and shared political activity.
What is the difference between power and violence for Arendt?
Power comes from people acting together; violence is instrumental and relies on means that magnify force. Violence can compel, injure, destroy, or constrain, while power depends on organized human support. Arendt recognizes that the two frequently coexist in practice, but she argues that they are different phenomena.
Does Arendt think violence is always ineffective?
No. Her theory explicitly recognizes the instrumental effectiveness of violence. Violence can achieve immediate ends and can destroy existing structures or power relationships. Her narrower claim is that violence alone does not generate the durable collective capacity she calls power.
How does authority differ from violence in Arendt?
Authority depends on recognized standing and accepted entitlement. When continuous force becomes necessary, the relationship is no longer operating through authority alone. Contemporary psychology approaches the neighboring question through legitimacy, which helps explain why people sometimes comply voluntarily because they regard an authority as proper or entitled.
Is Arendt’s theory of power a psychological theory?
It is a work of political philosophy and political theory. Psychological research can test related mechanisms such as legitimacy, collective efficacy, social identity, obedience, coercion, and sense of agency, but those findings should not be presented as direct tests of Arendt’s entire theory.
How does collective action relate to Arendt’s idea of power?
Collective action is central because Arendtian power appears through coordinated action among a plurality of people. Modern social psychology independently finds that identity, perceived injustice, efficacy, and moral conviction help predict participation in collective action. The constructs overlap around coordination and group motivation, while remaining theoretically distinct.
What does coercion do psychologically?
Coercion can narrow perceived choice and alter the experience of acting freely. In experimental work, Caspar and colleagues found reduced implicit sense of agency when participants acted under coercive orders. This finding concerns subjective agency; it does not by itself determine moral or legal responsibility.
Did Arendt and Milgram reach the same conclusion about obedience?
No. Their projects differ, and scholarship warns against collapsing them. Arendt’s work centers judgment, responsibility, action, and political conditions; Milgram experimentally studied responses to an authority in a laboratory. Modern reinterpretations of Milgram also question the simple idea of blind obedience and emphasize identification and engaged followership.