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13/13

As a starting point, I rely heavily on the definition of the state made famous by the German sociologist Max Weber:

“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”

So we can understand the state as an institution that controls a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a given territory.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

2/13

Let’s unpack each part of that definition a bit.

First, an institution is not just some group of people working together. It is a social structure with codified rules and norms that produce predictable actions and behaviors by its constituent members.

Second, a monopoly over violence means that just the state, and no one else, decides which kinds of violence by which kinds of people the state will tolerate. This doesn’t mean the state literally monopolizes violence, since anyone anywhere can always throw a bunch or pull a trigger. It just means that if someone does commit violence, the state is the sole local arbiter of whether other coercive actors under its jurisdiction will tolerate, support, or punish that act of violence.

Importantly, a society cannot hold a monopoly over violence as a collective actor, which I’ve seen some people try to argue. To hold a monopoly over violence collectively would imply that every individual holds the right to violence against everyone else, but also the right to be protected from violence by everyone else, which is a nonsensical contradiction.

(If you get into a dispute with a cop, you are almost certainly guaranteed to face the threat of yet more cops showing up to support the first one—there is no sense in which both you and the cop can both simultaneously hold a “monopoly” on violence. The state is not and cannot consist of “us” in the sense of the public; it will always stand apart from us.)

3/13

And third, the one that trips up a lot of people: legitimacy. Legitimacy in this definition does not imply rightful, morally correct, or even popular. It is a measure of how likely other actors are to endorse and support an action by the state. So, for example, if a random person commits a murder, other actors in society—bystanders, the police, courts, prison officials, the media—are likely to respond negatively. But if a police officer commits that same murder, those same actors are much more likely to endorse and support the murderer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence

4/13

So, we can say very broadly that the state is an institution that holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a given territory.

The state is not: a synonym for society in general, or people coming together to achieve shared goals, or hierarchy in general. The state is a specific institution of a specific kind hierarchy that exists in some, but not all, societies.

Indeed, the state has only been around for, at most, about 5,000 years. And for most of those 5,000 years, those states were incredibly fragile and ruled over a tiny fraction of the world and its population. It probably wasn’t until about 500 years ago that states came to dominate a majority of the global population and only in the last few hundred years that the state has taken on its pervasive, intrusive, all-encompassing power.

Far from being just another word for “society” or “community,” the state stands out as a distinct aberration in the human story.

https://aeon.co/essays/an-archeological-revolution-transforms-our-image-of-human-freedoms

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