Hannah Arendt on Power & Violence vs. Natality & Plurality

Hannah Arendt made a distinction between power and violence, which she insisted were opposites rather than degrees of the same thing.

Power springs up when people act in concert and vanishes the moment they disperse. Violence is what you reach for when power is gone.

Which raises the question of what is required to act in concert, what politics means.

Politics for her is inextricably bound up in natality and plurality.

Natality, the fact that each birth introduces someone capable of beginning something unpredictable, is what makes action possible at all, and it's the source of freedom.

Plurality: the condition that men, not Man, inhabit the earth, everyone distinct, nobody ever having been or ever going to be the same as anyone else. Plurality is why speech is necessary. It is why we can't even know what is possible until we know who is in the room, who is ready to act.

Between the two, democracy becomes what dictatorship could never be: a possibility for a unique, unpredictable and always evolving outcome. Something that emerges from the fact that not only are no two people alike but that those people are not even like themselves when they are in one group rather than another. 

Dictatorship is top down. Democracy emerges from unique people and possibilities free to explore and create something unprecedented and emergent.