AGuatemalan policeman holding a suspect at gunpoint during asecurity checkpoint exercise. Due to the monopoly on violence held by thestate, the policeman is allowed to use force and the threat of forcelegally where reasonable, while the suspect is not.
Inpolitical philosophy, amonopoly on violence ormonopoly on the legal use of force is the property of apolity that is the only entity in itsjurisdiction to legitimately useforce, and thus the supreme authority of thatarea.
While the monopoly on violence as the defining conception of thestate was first described in sociology byMax Weber in his essayPolitics as a Vocation (1919),[1] the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is a core concept of modern public law, which goes back to French jurist and political philosopherJean Bodin's 1576 workLes Six livres de la République and English philosopherThomas Hobbes's 1651 bookLeviathan. Weber claims that the state is the "only humanGemeinschaft which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimateuse of physical force. As such, states can resort to coercive means such as incarceration, expropriation, humiliation, 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."[2] 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. Such a monopoly, according to Weber, must occur via a process oflegitimation.
Max Weber wrote inPolitics as a Vocation that a fundamental characteristic of statehood is the claim of such a monopoly. An expanded definition appears inEconomy and Society:
A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' [if and] insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to themonopoly of thelegitimate use of physical force (das Monopol legitimenphysischen Zwanges) in the enforcement of its order.[3][4]
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 offeudalism, whereprivate warfare was permitted under certain conditions, and ofreligious courts, which had sole jurisdiction over some types of offenses, especiallyheresy 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'sself orproperty, 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 ofnatural law that hold that individual rights deriving from sapientself-ownership preexist the state and are only recognised and guaranteed by the state which may be restricted from limiting them byconstitutional law.[5]
The capacity of a state is often measured in terms of itsfiscal andlegal 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 ofcoercion, 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.[6]
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.[7]
In unorganized and underground markets, violence is used to enforce contracts in the absence of accessible legal conflict resolution.[8]Charles Tilly continues this comparison to say that warmaking and statemaking are actually the best representations of what organized crime can grow into.[9] The relationship between the state,markets and violence has been noted as having a direct relationship, using violence as a form of coercion.[10][11]Anarchists view a direct relationship betweencapitalism, authority, and the state; the notion of a monopoly of violence is largely connected toanarchist philosophy of rejection of all unjustifiedhierarchy.[12][13]
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.[15]
In theEncyclopedia 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.[16]
^Weber, Max (2015). Waters, Tony; Waters, Dagmar (eds.).Weber's rationalism and modern society: new translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification. Translated by Waters, Tony; Waters, Dagmar. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 129–198.doi:10.1057/9781137365866.ISBN978-1-137-37353-3.
^Weber, Max (2015). Waters, Tony; Waters, Dagmar (eds.).Weber's rationalism and modern society: new translations on politics, bureaucracy, and social stratification. Translated by Waters, Tony; Waters, Dagmar. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 136.doi:10.1057/9781137365866.ISBN978-1-137-37353-3.
^Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.).Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 54.
^Weber, Max (1980) [1921]. Winckelmann, Johannes (ed.).Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (5th ed.). Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). p. 29.
^Owens, Emily Greene (2011). "Are Underground Markets Really More Violent? Evidence from Early 20th Century America".American Law and Economics Review.13 (1):1–44.doi:10.1093/aler/ahq017.
^Tilly, Charles (1985). "War making and state making as organized crime". In Evans, P. B.; Rueschemeyer, D.; Skocpol, T. (eds.).Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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