Officer Michael McHale (2006-11-30), on reactions to the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell: I love all you monday morning quarterbacks. You really don’t have…
]]>I don’t really like to use Weber’s, because all sorts of human communities that aren’t really “States” in any other sense can claim that monopoly. From an Anarchist perspective, it’s important to draw a distinction between societies where force is rarely used at all and the State system, which institutionalizes it.
Some Anthropologists will go so far as to call any human society with a unified political system a State.
A lot of people also categorize poitical entities in terms of “Westphalian States”, although I’m not really sure that that is a particularily good definition, either. The modern State interferes in the average person’s life on a far broader scale than the fledgling States that existed when a bunch of European warlords carved up the map.
Plenty of proposed political systems that most Anarchists would call “Anarchist” could, by at least a couple of the definitions be called States, although they’d be massively different from anything that’s ever called itself a State in History.
Over the past little while, I’ve begun to think that “The State” is a concept that doesn’t do nearly a good enough job of describing the real world. Is a State-Run medical system in any way a part of a Weberian State, by virtue of being funded out of the same coffers as the forces that hold a monopoly on the use of force, or is it some other, different kind of social institution that happens to be lumped in with the State?
]]>Provided that one only means by legitimate
what Weber means by it, I don’t detest the Weberian definition of the State. I think it’s an accurate description of what all States aim to become, insofar as they can. My disagreement with Weber doesn’t have to do with his description of State processes, but rather with the value that he attaches to them.
that is what State power means, and that is what the job of a ruler is: to maintain a monopoly of coercion over its territorial area
As much as you might detest it, Weber’s definition of state is grotesquely libertarian. He defines it as “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” One might simplify this to “a monopoly on the use of force within a given territory.”
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