Followup to my pinned Weber / Definition of Government thread:

There's an excellent podcast examination of this here:

https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership

Some earlier discussion:
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/108541676665844169

What the podcast doesn't get into is that the more modern abbreviated "monopoly on violence" form seems to originate with Murray Rothbard and was further popularised by Robert Nozick, both Libertarian philosophers / propagandists.

(I strongly hesitate to apply the word "philosopher" to Rothbard. Nozick is not entirely undeserving.)

#MaxWeber #LegitimateClaimToMonopolyOnViolenceInARegion #AllFiveTerms #MonopolyOnViolence #MonopolyOnCoercion

@raucao The typical Libertarian misrepresentation is that the state claims "a monopoly on violence", vaguely handwaving at Weber.

What Max Weber actually wrote was that for an organisation within a territorial area:

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

https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mode/1up?view=theater

Emphasis in the original.

This gives a set of possible circumstances:

• No territorial control: not a state.
• No legitimacy to the claim: not a state. (This includes arbitrary, inequitable, and/or nonsystematic use.)
• No monopoly in legitimate use of force: not a state

Absent a state, by Weber's definition, a geographic region lacks one or more of legitimacy or monopoly. Odds are quite high that violence in some form or manner will exist. What it will lack is accountability, systematic application according to accepted law, and legitimacy.

And if some entity, hierarchical or self-organised, emerges within a region, which can successfully claim a legitimate monopoly to use of force, then whatever it calls itself (corporation, commune, anarcho-syndicate, ...), it is by Weber's definition a state.

Best I can tell, the misrepresentation originates with Murray Rothbard in the early 1960s, though it's possible he picked it up elsewhere. Weber's works were just being translated and published in English at about that time.

That's the critique against the "monopoly of violence" justification.

NAP suffers numerous other defects, of course. Most of which is it's a self-justifying rationalisation and myth with no factual or empirical basis.

@s0

#MaxWeber #MonopolyOnViolence #NAP NonAggression #MurrayRothbard #State #Libertarianism

Max Weber defined government, in a much misinterpreted prase, as "the only human community which lays claim to the monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force". ALL TERMMS ARE SIGNIFICANT. Far too many readers focus on "use of physical force", but any playground bully, mean drunk, or capricious idiot can use violence. Government requires legitimacy, typically only bequeathed by the governed, and a monopoly on that legitimacy, meaning no other agent can make a countering claim within a given region.

The definition is reflexive and tautological:

• An entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is a government or state, regardless of what it calls itself.
• A region with no monopoly on legitimacy is ungoverned.
• An entity lacking legitimacy, regardless of what it calls itself, is not a government.

Rather than casting this as a monopoly on force, it's far more useful to consider this a monopoly on legitimacy.

The model is, as all models are, wrong. But it is, as some models are, also useful, in two principle ways.

One is that it provides a useful lens through which to consider govenment, governance, and polity, stripped of most ideological or structural biases. We can ask how, or whether, a democracy, personality cult, autonomous collective, theocracy, dictatorship, representational republic, monarchy, company town, oligarchy, or other forms have legitimacy and/or monopoly over use of force.

The other is that in being so widely misquoted, misinterpreted, and misrepresented, it is a highly useful bullshit filter for identifying those who are either ignorant of what they speak, or are intentionally attempting to mislead, in discussions of governance.

This includes virtually all Rothbardian/Randian/Misian Libertarians and their "nonaggression principle", notably Charles Koch and Penn Gilette, both of whom explicitly cite this as the foundation of their belief. From a false premise all that follows is false.

#MaxWeber #government #MonopolyOnViolence #MonopolyOnLegitimacy #libertarianism #nap