For Better or for Worse

ON VIOLENCE by Hannah Arendt. 106 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.75.

REBELS IN EDEN: MASS POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES by Richard E. Rubenstein. 201 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Hannah Arendt opens her essay on violence by launching an attack on the think-tank methods of "scientifically minded brain trusters." The trouble, she points out, "is not that they are coldblooded enough to 'think the unthinkable,' but that they do not think."

That is the last thing anyone would say of Hannah Arendt. She thinks and thinks. Moreover, the quality of her thought is rare. Absorbed in the process of philosophical presentation, she drapes herself in scrupulous erudition. As if digging were finding, she sometimes struggles to unearth the obvious with an aphoristic shovel: "Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together."

The habit of placing concepts in convoluted categories only slightly obscures the author's anxiety about violence and its personal consequences. She sympathizes with the contemporary rage against such things as the war-prone tendency of technology and bureaucratic "rule by Nobody." She understands the "this-is-the-way-the-world-ends" feeling of today's youth as it contemplates the possibility of environmental disaster or atomic war. Though the causes of rebellion and violence often seem just, the use of violence obviously dismays her. "Power and violence are opposites," she writes. "Where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance." The essence of her view seems to be a sort of humane pessimism about violence. Dreams do not come true, she asserts with Marx. "The rarity of slave rebellions and uprisings among the disinherited and downtrodden is notorious; on the few occasions when they occurred, it was precisely 'mad fury' [in Sartre's phrase] that turned dreams into nightmares for everybody."

Mythical Melting Pot. By contrast, Richard Rubenstein has converted similar concerns into a lively argument full of historic fact. His theme is simple -- and fashionable. Violence, he says in Rebels in Eden, is often an effective and imperative act of the powerless seeking imperative act of the powerless seeking power. American history is incomparably richer in violence than most Americans are willing to remember.

While Americans sometimes rewrite their history, they seldom reread it. Rubenstein's book offers an excellent opportunity to do just that. He is invigorating and honest in his ironies; for him, the K.K.K. and CORE share the same sort of motivation. He proceeds through the American Revolution, the Indian revolts, the Civil War, various agrarian rebellions and labor-management wars, before confronting his main topic: race riots, early and late. Rubenstein demonstrates that in each case the oppressed group's lust for independence--through integration or separatism--is so powerful, indeed biological, an urge that it will not bear indefinite frustration.

Rubenstein also takes pains to analyze why successful groups tend to resent the remaining unmeltable pieces in the mythical melting pot. Once they have become assimilated, they assume that " 'we have arrived; therefore America has arrived.' " This fallacy, Rubenstein goes on to say, "recapitulates a tragic error--the identification of the American dream with present reality. And this, of course, is precisely what the myth of peaceful progress is intended to accomplish. The characterization of America as a peacefully self-transforming system leaves no room for violent protest. Eden is not Eden unless he who rebels is an original sinner."

Fair Slice of the Pie. Rubenstein is assistant director of the Adlai Stevenson Institute and a consultant to the former National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He is aware that the U.S. has been a self-changing society. His conclusion is that Americans will continue to suffer violence until those in power can grant to others what they have in the past violently demanded for themselves: a fully fair slice of the pie or an independent share of the territory. The book, moreover, offers a sensible corrective to the myopic and apocalyptic view adopted by many Americans who are unfamiliar with the past: because violence is in the air and on the streets, everything is going to hell. But Rubenstein also runs some risk of being misread. Sloppily read by others, he might seem to be saying: "Violence is good for you; relax and enjoy it."

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