Monopoly on violence

Max Weber's theory

Max Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation that a fundamental characteristic of statehood is the claim of such a monopoly. An expanded definition appears in Economy and Society:

Weber applied several caveats to this definition:

• He intended the statement as a contemporary observation, noting that the connection between the state and the use of physical force has not always been so close. He uses the examples of feudalism, where private warfare was permitted under certain conditions, and of religious courts, which had sole jurisdiction over some types of offenses, especially heresy and sex crimes (thus the nickname "bawdy courts"). Regardless, the state exists wherever a single authority can legitimately authorize violence.
• For the same reasons, "monopoly" does not mean that only the government may use physical force, but that the state is that human community which successfully claims for itself to be the only source of legitimacy for all physical coercion or adjudication of coercion. For example, the law might permit individuals to use force in defense of one's self or property, but this right derives from the state's authority. This conflicts directly with enlightenment principles of individual sovereignty that delegates power to the state by consent, and concepts of natural law that hold that individual rights deriving from sapient self-ownership preexist the state and are only recognised and guaranteed by the state which may be restricted from limiting them by constitutional law.

Relation to state capacity

The capacity of a state is often measured in terms of its fiscal and legal capacity, fiscal capacity meaning the state's ability to recover taxation, and legal capacity meaning the state's supremacy as sole arbiter of conflict resolution and contract enforcement. Without some sort of coercion, the state would not otherwise be able to enforce its legitimacy in its desired sphere of influence. In early and developing states, this role was often played by the "stationary bandit" who defended villagers from roving bandits, in the hope that the protection would incentivize villagers to invest in economic production, and the stationary bandit could eventually use its coercive power to expropriate some of that wealth.

In regions where the state does not establish full control of violence, non-state actors such as the Sicilian Mafia in southern Italy create and fill a market for private protection.

In unorganized and underground markets, violence is used to enforce contracts in the absence of accessible legal conflict resolution. Charles Tilly continues this comparison to say that warmaking and statemaking are actually the best representations of what organized crime can grow into. The relationship between the state, markets and violence has been noted as having a direct relationship, using violence as a form of coercion. Anarchists view a direct relationship between capitalism, authority, and the state; the notion of a monopoly of violence is largely connected to anarchist philosophy of rejection of all unjustified hierarchy.

Other

According to Raymond Aron, international relations are characterized by the absence of widely acknowledged legitimacy in the use of force between states.

Martha Lizabeth Phelps takes Weber's ideas on the legitimacy of private security a step further, claiming that the use of private actors by the state remains legitimate if and only if military contractors are perceived as being controlled by the state.

In the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict, Jon D. Wiseman points out that a state's monopoly on violence is conferred by the people of that state in exchange for protection of their person and property, which in turn grants states the ability to coerce and exploit people through, for example, taxation.

References

References

1. Weber, Max. (2015). "Weber's rationalism and modern society: new translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification". Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Weber, Max. (2015). "Weber's rationalism and modern society: new translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification". Palgrave Macmillan.
3. Weber, Max. (1978). "Economy and Society". University of California Press.
4. Weber, Max. (1980). "Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft". J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
5. {{Britannica. 1916738
6. Olson, Mancur. (1993). "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development". American Political Science Review.
7. Gambetta, Diego. (1996). "The Sicilian Mafia: the business of private protection". Harvard University Press.
8. Owens, Emily Greene. (2011). "Are Underground Markets Really More Violent? Evidence from Early 20th Century America". American Law and Economics Review.
9. Tilly, Charles. (1985). "Bringing the State Back In". Cambridge University Press.
10. (1986). "Networks: Between markets and hierarchies". Strategic Management Journal.
11. (1973). "Markets and Hierarchies: Some Elementary Considerations". The American Economic Review.
12. (2019). "How the normative resistance of anarchism shaped the state monopoly on violence". European Journal of International Relations.
13. (2012). "Anarchism! What Geography Still Ought to be". Antipode.
14. Raymond Aron. ''Paix et guerre entre les nations'', Paris 1962; English: ''Peace and War'', 1966. New edition 2003.
15. Phelps, Martha Lizabeth. (December 2014). "Doppelgangers of the State: Private Security and Transferable Legitimacy". Politics & Policy.
16. (1999). "Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, and Conflict". Elsevier Science.