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What you’re missing is that violence itself is an enforcement of state power. There is a reason why people carry weapons in CHAZ. In a power vacuum, the group that has the most weapons will be the de facto ruler of the area. For instance, Somalia does have a formal government, but without violence such a state does not exist in reality. Another way to phrase it is, in the words of Bret Weinstein, police brutality is a feature, not a bug.

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Police brutality is a bug, at least most of the time. The best de-facto rulers are quite aware that it's enough to speak softly and carry a big stick. If you're brutal to others for no real reason, this will be seen as a reason to deter you from exerting that brutality. It's a good thing that we have robust institutions that allow people to do that peacefully.

No, I’m not missing that. To quote myself: “the state obviously depends on a monopoly on violence to sustain itself.” The point is that violence is not the source of state power, but its instrument. This is a real distinction, not just word games, and it often gets elided when people talk about the state as a monopoly on violence. You said it yourself: “In a power vacuum, the group that has the most weapons...” Violence reigns in the absence of state legitimacy. Governments that forget this tend to fall into chaos, lawlessness and corruption. For example, Somalia. Or read Fire in the Lake for an examination of the way all the violence in the world couldn’t make up for the lack of legitimacy of the US-backed South Vietnamese government.

When Weber is talking about the state being defined by a monopoly on violence, he’s talking about the definition of the modern state as opposed to the pre-modern, not an inherent feature of all human organization and government. The medieval king, for example, certainly didn’t hold a monopoly on violence.

> The medieval king, for example, certainly didn’t hold a monopoly on violence.

He did indirectly, through the concept of divine right. This power was so immense, that a single king could wage war against an entire religion, as in the Crusades. If that isn't monopoly on violence, I don't know what is.

No, it’s far from a monopoly on violence in Weber’s sense (or any, really). The king had to manage a whole bunch of aristocrats who had their own armed forces and could pursue their own ends.

Anyway, not sure what you’re arguing against: the divine right of kings is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say legitimacy.

I think I see legitimacy as being inextricably tied to the monopoly on violence. That is to say, the monopoly on violence is not only sufficient for legitimacy, it is necessary.

They are linked, but not inextricably, and the relationship is more complex than something like “the state is defined by a monopoly on power” may lead us to believe. After all, the modern state (ie one that has a monopoly on violence) is a fairly recent development: in the west, somewhere around the 1600s. And yet governments existed before then, so there has to be something more going on.

We hear something like “the state is a monopoly on violence” very frequently, but without the idea’s original limited context as part of the definition of the modern state. It helps it go unexamined that our personal experience is only with modern states, so it seems intuitively fundamental. We take it to mean that the legitimacy of the state derives from the power of the army (and police, etc). It feels like hard-eyed realism, seeing through the masks to the coercion beneath. But the real situation is reversed, and historically governments without a strong enough story of legitimacy are unable to create or sustain a monopoly on violence. (Note that violence may be an important part of that story, as with the American revolution).

To go back to Rome as an example of how this kind of “realism” can fail us, power in the republic being reduced to who could muster the most swords or the biggest mob wasn’t the true nature of government revealed, it was the end of the republic.

I’ve written way more than I intended, but I really enjoy talking about this stuff. I’m not saying that the monopoly on violence line is wrong exactly, but that taken too simply it can be misleading.

(I’m aware that the Rome example is fraught—after all it isn’t a modern state so we shouldn’t apply Weber’s terms. But for this purpose I think it works: it’s arguably the closest thing to a modern state in the pre-modern western world, and goes to my point about how power and authority are more complex than a “realistic” view that reduces it to violence.

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