The Second Time As Farce

Why this election feels like a parody of a more dignified past

A few years ago I wrote about why my pet peeve is people using the phrase “monopoly on the use of violence” as a description of what makes a state a state. My quibble was a little pedantic: the definition is misquoted from Max Weber, who actually characterized the state as holding a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” While Weber’s definition is precise, I explained, the common misuse of it is obviously wrong. The state clearly does not “monopolize” violence; plenty of non-state actors make use of it — these people are called thugs, criminals and terrorists. The state does, however, claim the exclusive right to use violence legitimately — which is to say, in the view of the public, legally and with the proper authority. In fact, it is precisely because the state is exclusively authorized to use violence that we call any violent non-state actors “criminals.”

But even more annoying to me than its imprecision is that by excluding the word “legitimate,” the perverted version of Weber’s classic definition totally distorts his entire conception of power. Weber’s interest is not in how certain people compel other people to obey them through overt threats of brute force, which is the most basic, and most uninteresting, form of power. It’s how those people get others to obey them willingly, which is the very essence of statecraft. They do this by cultivating the perception that their power is not arbitrary, but legitimate. When subjects or citizens regards it as their moral duty to submit to the commands of those that rule them, mere power becomes authority, and a territory’s rulers become a state rather than an occupying army. You can’t really understand much about Weber without comprehending this basic insight.

Weber points to three forms of what he calls “legitimate domination,” a phrase he uses interchangeably with “authority.” Before describing what they are, it’s important to preface this by noting that Weber was interested in understanding the social structures of civilizations through all of human history, not just its modern incarnations. You have to get a bit outside of your modern frame of mind to appreciate what makes these different forms of authority so significant. We live, today, in a world shaped by what Weber called “legal-rational authority,” in which the rationalization for every rule is that it’s technically efficient and that the formal legal process of determining it was appropriate. We take this form of authority so much for granted that it’s hard to recognize that there has ever been a different rationalization for the exercise of power. But earlier modes of civilization did not justify their rules and laws by making rational, technical or legalistic arguments for their efficacy, and their contemporaries would have found our ways of explaining our forms of organization just as perplexing as we find theirs.

But our era is the exception, not the rule. Throughout most of human history in every part of the world, the basis of authority has been not “reason” but tradition.

Tradition circumscribed who had power over whom:

The elders of the clan make decisions on behalf of everyone because they always have.

The monarch passes the throne to his eldest son because this is what our ancestors have always done.

And tradition set the limits of that power, and thus the basis for resisting it:

The clergy will sanctify the proclamations of the king, and the king will defer to the clergy on all church matters. This has always been so.

The serfs have the right to graze their livestock on the landlord’s pastures, and the lord cannot deny them this right because they have always enjoyed it.

In these societies, which, again, were every society throughout most of history, custom sufficed as the justification of authority. There was no need to countenance power on any other basis. This form of authority was the default setting for the human species, and it endured for millennia.

To say that traditional authority was resilient, however, is not to pretend that its inheritors did not encounter resistance: they did, constantly. But when traditional rulers faced revolt, it was typically because those rulers broke with tradition by overstepping the widely acknowledged boundaries of their authority. Uprisings thus tended to be conservative in nature: they sought to restore the status quo ante, not to topple the social order. Peasant revolts, which were frequent in Medieval Europe, reliably conformed to this unruly-but-non-subversive spirit, which is why they inspired such disdain from Karl Marx.

Occasionally, however, traditional authority would find itself faced with a truly revolutionary force — a movement that sought not to bring back the prior balance of power, but to challenge its very legitimacy. When they were successful and widespread, these were rare and momentous events in human history.