The purpose of this article is to show that there was a significant shift in Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the question of violence in the thought of Karl Marx. While Arendt emphasized the “basic contradiction” of violence during the study she made of Marx’s place in the tradition of the Left in the 1950s, she later employed the concepts of “development” and “dialectical movement” in order to clarify and deepen her critique of Marx’s theory about the transformation of violence. This article relates this change to the differentiation she made between violence and politics.