Conor Cruise O'Brien and the Legitimation of Violence

Abstract

This article deals with a little known collection of essays by Conor Cruise O’Brien entitled Herod: Reflections on Political Violence. These essays are based on varying interpretations of legitimacy, as it relates to democracy, violence and history. From the disavowal of his own previously held left‐wing radical positions and critiques, especially as they applied to ‘the Troubles’ and institutionalised violence, it illustrates that O’Brien’s focus was, ironically, not on Northern Ireland, but on the Republic. It examines the arguments he employed to cast political violence in 1970s Ireland as illegitimate, and how through the moral interpretation of history, he not only managed to rewrite history through the prism of present politics, but also created a political reflex within Ireland that remains in public discourse to the present day.

Notes

1. He gives no date for its authorship, but merely explains that it was ‘a late product of the 1960s’ (Herod, p. 7).

2. In an interview with David Caute (2003), who worked closely with O’Brien at this time, Caute suggested that O’Brien became more radical than he actually was because of his closeness with his students. This had the effect of making his later ‘conversion’ appear more dramatic because of the temporary radicalising effect of his sojourn in New York.

3. ‘Or the other way around, depending on your ideology.’

4. ‘According to a nineteenth‐century Irish agitator, William O’Brien, violence is the best way of insuring a hearing for moderation [laughter]. Obviously, this is not always the case but it sometimes is, as is proved, for example, by the solicitude which the governments of major American cities show for the welfare of the Negro population during the summer months.’ Transcript of debate at ‘Theater for Ideas Forum’, New York, 15 December 1967. Republished in Klein, A. (Ed.) (1971) Dissent, Power and Confrontation (New York: McGraw‐Hill). The principal speakers at the discussion on the topic of ‘The legitimacy of violence as a political act’ were O’Brien, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag.

5. O’Brien’s own term.

6. The Cyril Foster Lecture delivered at University of Oxford, 6 May 1977.

7. O’Brien, ‘Holy War’, The New York Review of Books, 6 November 1969. He also refers to a ‘system of caste privilege’. His use of the term ‘natives’ was ironic.

8. An explicit example of his growing disenchantment with his earlier radical colleagues is seen in the following: ‘It is through such concepts as institutionalised violence that the more antique and atavistic parts of the of the repertoire of legitimation are themselves legitimised in the minds of for example, students and ex‐students, and of others who would be ashamed to think of themselves as obsessed with the past. And it is through such concepts, and through those who find comfort in them, that our forms of violence come to seem legitimate internationally, and especially among the international left’.

9. Although O’Brien’s primary degree was in French and Irish, he took what was known as a supplemental in History under R. B. McDowell and received a first. While working in External Affairs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he completed his PhD on Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party under Theo Moody. None the less while O’Brien is the author of some 10 historical volumes, he never followed a professional historian’s path. A proper analysis of the historiography of O’Brien is an entirely separate work that cannot be achieved within the limits of this article. Suffice to say that I am drawing attention to his unusual fusion of two historical perspectives – the professional one and the highly personal and political one.

10. This teleological approach underwrites the disciplines of sociology and psychology, for example.

11. Mansergh is quoting from Gwynn’s biography of Redmond, and offers the view that the bravado was specifically for Redmond’s audience. Redmond, he assures us, would never act unconstitutionally. Perhaps not, but from our point of view, all that matters is that Redmond felt it necessary to say it to his audience.

12. Fitzgerald (1966). See also ‘Was 1916 really necessary?’, Irish Independent, 22 and 23 February 1967. For a more recent take on a very similar counterfactual, see Jackson (1997: 175–227).

13. I accept that O’Brien might not actually have ‘created’ it; the immorality of violence had entered debate many times in the past in Ireland and elsewhere. However, in the context of the 1970s, O’Brien was the outstanding figure in not merely reintroducing it, but in remorselessly tarring all opponents with it.