The Right to Strike and Legal War in Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence”

Abstract

The object of this article is to show how, at the beginning of his essay “Toward the Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin uses the questions of the right to strike and law of war to exemplify the way in which the state monopoly has no other goal than to preserve the law itself. In so doing, the question of the boundary between violence and nonviolence is put into conversation with the distinction made by Georges Sorel between the political strike and the general revolutionary strike.