Only the state can legally use “coercive means such as incarceration, expropriation,…and death threats to obtain the population’s compliance with its rule and thus maintain order. However, this monopoly is limited to a certain geographical area, and in fact this limitation to a particular area is one of the things that defines a state. In other words, Weber describes the state as any organization that succeeds in holding the exclusive right to use, threaten, or authorize physical force against residents of its territory.”
Lawful self-defense is only permitted in any jurisdiction that I am aware of to the extent that it stops another person from unlawfully committing violence against oneself or others. People are not allowed to proactively commit violence or use it as a means to settle a dispute.
And it seems indisputable that the state can legally employ violence and physical force against me, but I cannot do the same to others, much less agents of the state itself.
I agree (qualifiedly, as I am still thinking about it, but probably) with your closing paragraphs. And that is precisely the reason why, in a country that is devoted to the principles that this country was supposed to be founded on, there must be very strong checks on that power – rights of review, for example, where overuse of that power can be retroactively punished and corrected for the future. The ideal is that citizens do not need to be afraid of other citizens, as they are protected by these powers of the government, and that citizens do not need to be afraid of their government because of the effectiveness of those checks.
As countries go, the US has proven rather more lacking in the strength of those checks than many of us had supposed. Many of them seem now to have rested on the strength of custom and habit, which in the event have not stood up entirely well to assaults that ignore custom and habit.
Technically that’s an exception. But I would argue how strongly regulated and restricted the right to self defense is an indication of how jealously the state monopoly of violence is protected. You only have the right to protect you and the people around you’s immediately personal safety. If you start using violence like an agent of the state, the state will shut that down sharpish
Granted, the article I linked to also describes the concept as the state’s “monopoly on the legal use of [physical] force”, and goes on to extend the concept to the threat of physical force and other means of coercion, such as incarceration.
But whether we are talking about physical force, violence, the threat to commit violence, or incarceration, only the state can legally employ any of these.
And yes, there are laws that will hopefully keep the state in check, but enforcement of those laws are up to the chief law enforcement officer of the state and the courts.
One point of view is that the state has a monopoly of force against its citizen, which calls to mind dystopian societies.
But another point of view is l’Etat c’est nous. We, the individuals in the society, have made the state our sole instrument for using force. We prefer this to a system where anybody can feel they have the right to choose, as an individual, to use force.
By the way, somehow I lost all of the attribution tags for everyone (including myself) who was quoted in my first post when I linked from the other thread. This looks like a Discourse bug to me. At the least the avatars are all shown, and the links point to the correct posts in the other thread. But I apologize anyway to the quoted posters @Lucas_Jackson and @Lumpy for any possible confusion due to the lack of attribution.
yes, but keep in mind that is not an unqualified right. It must be a legitimate use of force, not random government firing squads indiscriminately shooting at people in the neighborhood.
Totally agree. Despite the rather disconcerting name, the so-called state monopoly on violence is actually a good thing, as it precludes violence by lawless non-state actors to enforce their will.
This is pretty much indeed the case, though, which is why it is so important for there to be laws limiting how law enforcement officers can administer violence or the use of force.
With that said, our federal courts have ruled that if a law enforcement officer is arresting me, I am powerless to defend myself or resist in any way. And if the officer feels that I am threatening him (or her) in any way, they can employ deadly force against me.
I actually have a problem with much of this, because I think the pendulum has shifted much too far in the direction of law enforcement officers employing deadly force when it is not necessary or warranted.
What I’d say is that “state has a monopoly on violence” is an idiomatic buzz-phrase. As such, it was chosen because it trips off the tongue, but the books behind the idea contain chapter and verse about a lot of details that are unsaid in the magic phrase itself. Proceeding from general to specific. …
IMO here’s what Hobbes & subsequent philosophers really meant. As they explained over several hundred pages of dense 1600-1900 era prose.
The state has a monopoly on violence employed for the public good. The general public has no right to violence contrary to that.
A narrow right to defense of self, others, and some property, as against your fellow citizens, is not a violation of Rule 1. If you need to exercise self-defense, somebody else is already violating Rule 1 towards you, invites the state to legitimately crush them, and meanwhile you’re allowed to respond in proportional kind until the state arrives to take control of all the situational violence.
The definition of “public good” in Rule 1 varies between a (possibly benign) despotism, aggressive Fascism, and modern pluralistic democracy. To the degree the state fails to advance the public good, the citizenry retain the right of individual anti-state violence. But beware that that way lies anarchy, warlordism, disease, pestilence, and all the rest. Choose wisely. Anarchy and warlordism can be far harder to live under than are some forms of despotism (e.g. Somalia vs. Türkiye). Likewise harder to recover from.
Right. Self-defense is a sort of delegation of that monopoly. There are places in the world where the right to use violence in self-defense is very curtailed compared to most states, and that’s because the states and those other countries choose it to be so.
The US is an outlier in that there’s a sort of explicit nod toward the People as the ultimate source of the US government’s legitimacy, in the Second Amendment’s recognition of the right to retain the tools for that violence.
Also, I think the Declaration of Independence says a few things pertinent to this debate:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
I believe that even Hobbes conceded that a government that would not or could not fulfill the overarching justification for its existence– protecting people from violent death– would have forfeited its legitimacy.
Sure. The principle that the state has a monopoly on violence does not come with any guarantee that the state will use its monopoly justly or wisely. Which is why it’s important to develop and mantain a strong legal and political culture of the rule of law and of respect for fundamental rights.
How exactly is that done if the state and its actors decide that they don’t want or need to respect the rule of law or fundamental rights? Or perhaps more pertinently, what if they take the attitude of “uphold government first, rights second”? Or flatly deny that abuses in fact constitute violations of the rule of law or rights? Governments are really big on in essence saying “Shut up and do what you’re told”. And backing that up with violence.
Let me put it another way: the state has a monopoly on violence whether or not it is aliberal and democratic state. And the fact that the state has a monopoly on violence is the most compelling reason why you should want it to be liberal and democratic.
We don’t have a choice about whether the state has a monopoly on violence; that’s pretty much a defining characteristic of the state. A state that doesn’t have a monopoly on violence is, at best, what we nowadays call a failed state. If we have a functioning state at all, it’s going to have a monopoly of violence; the only thing we can hope to influence is whether it’s a liberal democracy.
How exactly do we ensure that the state is liberal and democratic? It’s not easy, as evidenced by the fact that many societies have never developed a liberal, democratic state, and some societies which have liberal, democratic states lose them.
On the encouraging side, the long term trend in the modern era has favoured liberal democracy. At the turn of the last century perhaps 10% of the world’s states could be described as liberal democracies; to day, it’s more like 45-50%.
Don’t we? At least in legal theory as an ideal (practice of course was always more statist), the American Founders seemed to think differently. At least to the extent they claimed to take this whole armed populace thing seriously. Certainly they were NOT Hobbesians.
Indeed. Literally every time U.S. citizens have taken up arms against what they perceive to be the tyranny of the federal government—going back to the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s—it has been treated as an insurrection and put down by force by the government.
There is a solution to that problem but I hope we don’t reach that point.
A government is only able to maintain its monopoly on violence to the extent that the people in that society are in general accord with the government. A government that is no longer seen as legitimate by its people will find that the people are willing to use violence against the government and its agents.
I see the state monopoly on violence as something closer to a bug than a feature. Ideally, the state would do its utmost to avoid violence, and yet too often “the state has a monopoly on violence” gets touted as a justification of the states use of violence rather than an explanation of why the state’s violence is so often tolerated when maybe it shouldn’t be. It also gets used as a justification in the international context, for invasion and occupation of “states” (such as they may be)that are unable to maintain that monopoly.