"This translation places before English readers for the first time the most comprehensible version yet of Benjamin's compelling and demanding essay."-Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University "Fenves and Ng have assembled the definitive scholarly edition in English of Walter Benjamin's influential 1921 essay "Toward the Critique of Violence".An indispensable resource for those interested in Benjamin's particular intervention at a place where political theology meets questions of morality, power, and authority. Essential." -G.D. Miller, CHOICE "A new edition of Benjamin's allusive essay helps elucidate what is often enigmatic and esoteric about a text whose author is working towards a more Marxist perspective. It is fully annotated and includes a large and helpful selection of notes and fragments by Benjamin that are closely related to what he was formulating.

"-Sean Sheehan, The Prisma "In making Benjamin's essay and these various sets of writings easily accessible to a new generation of English-language readers, as well as scholars already conversant with the main text, this critical edition encourages the sort of deep analysis it enables. Readers of Benjamin of all kinds, from undergraduate and graduate students to established scholars, will surely appreciate the book and the manifold resources it has to offer."-Michael Powers, The German Quarterly.