What distinguishes the state is not its aims but its instrument: being able to enforce its rule, if necessary, by touching the body. However customary this power looks, one question stays open — who protects us against the protector?
When Max Weber defined the state as the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a given territory, he was drawing attention to the state’s distinguishing instrument rather than to its aims. Education, roads, health or relief can also be provided by other institutions. What makes the state different is that it can enforce its rules by coercion when necessary and sees in itself the authority to forbid the violence of other powers.
The monopoly is not the absence of violence
A monopoly of violence does not mean there is no longer violence in society. While the use of force by individuals and groups is restricted, the police, the army and the penal system become institutionalised. The state centralises violence rather than abolishing it, determining who may use force and under what conditions.
This centralisation can limit blood feuds, private armies and the open bullying of the strong. An order in which people do not have to defend their rights by their own strength offers an important guarantee. But the same concentration also creates a great danger, because there is no stronger authority to supervise the state’s violence.
Who confers the adjective “legitimate”?
The critical word in Weber’s definition is not only violence but legitimacy. When a bandit uses a weapon it counts as a crime, when a police officer does it counts as duty. The difference lies not only in the act but in the recognised authority of the one acting. Yet the source of that authority is contestable. If the state makes its own law, applies it and investigates the use of force through its own institutions again, a closed circle can form in which legitimacy approves itself.
Legal authority does not justify every use of force. Even if an intervention is written into the law it may be disproportionate, discriminatory or contrary to human dignity. Legitimacy requires more than a uniform and a procedure: necessity, proportion, transparency and real accountability.
The everyday face of the use of force
State violence is not only the baton in the square or the weapon on the battlefield. Behind seizure, eviction, detention, deportation and punishment there also lies the possibility of physical coercion. Most transactions run through calm paper and official language; but if the citizen does not comply, at the end of the chain stands a capacity for force.
This fact does not require us to call every rule violence. Still, it recalls the sanction behind the neutral appearance of bureaucratic procedure. An order does not lose its coercive character because it is carried out willingly; open intervention may have been unnecessary precisely because people knew what the outcome would be.
How does private violence merge with the state?
The state’s claim to monopoly is never perfect in practice. Private security companies, armed groups and holders of economic power can use coercion in different ways. Instead of banning these powers the state sometimes licenses them, supports them or looks away. The monopoly thus becomes as much the authority to determine who is permitted to use force as the direct use of it.
Economic necessity too, though different from physical violence, can seriously narrow people’s room for movement. The state protects not only the force on the street but also the property order and contracts with its capacity for coercion. The monopoly of violence therefore cannot be thought independently of class relations. Deciding which property will be protected and which objection disturbs public order is a political choice.
Supervising the protector
If the capacity to use violence is exercised in society’s name, it must be open to society’s strong and continuous supervision. Without independent investigation, open records, judicial review and effective avenues of appeal for victims, the institution turns into a structure that assesses its own mistakes. Nor should officers saying they were merely carrying out orders remove responsibility.
Even so, a better-supervised monopoly may not be enough on its own. Social conditions that reduce the need for violence must also be built. Where inequality, exclusion and insecurity run deep, the security institution grows continually. The consequences of problems are managed by policing methods while their political causes go unresolved.
Before praising or condemning the state, Weber’s definition makes its hard core visible. The state’s last word is the authority to touch the body when necessary. However customary and lawful this authority looks, it must remain permanently open to a question: is the one using force really protecting society’s security, or building their own security over society?
Thinking of the monopoly of violence only through the visible acts of the police or the army remains incomplete. Behind many administrative and legal processes — an eviction order, a deportation, a seizure, compulsory treatment or the dispersal of an assembly — there lies at the final stage the possibility of physical coercion. Most people never meet that coercion directly; they obey the rule because they know the force behind it. The state’s everyday authority works precisely by keeping alive the belief that it could use violence, without constantly using it.
The adjective “legitimate” is not an automatic compliment here. Weber describes an order in which people accept that the authority of physical coercion within a given territory belongs to the state. That acceptance can change, be disputed and be abused. The existence of a law does not by itself create legitimacy; the law may be discriminatory, its application disproportionate, its supervision ineffective. A power’s being counted legitimate does not mean every use of it is justified.
The boundary between private and state violence is not always clear either. Private security companies, prison services, border technologies and the rules by which platforms regulate public speech can carry governing functions over to corporations. Even when the state delegates authority it cannot delegate responsibility. Private actors producing outcomes in the name of public power while hiding behind commercial secrecy make the monopoly of violence less visible but more dispersed.
The way to limit the monopoly of violence is not only to write more detailed procedures. An independent judiciary, open data, effective avenues of complaint, press freedom and public supervision of the units that use force are needed. Alongside these, policies must be built that do not turn housing, income, care and mental health problems into security matters. A state that answers every social conflict with its capacity for coercion enlarges the need for its own monopoly. If security means people being able to live without fear, we cannot leave it to armed institutions alone.