In the view of many modern political theorists—modern as in from the Renaissance onward—that nations are the only entities with the moral authority to use force, however limited that use must be to remain within the boundaries of civilized action. The exception to this is to be found solely in personal self-defense, though in many European countries and in some American states, preparing for a violent assault, say by arranging to have a weapon nearby, is seen as crossing over into what government can only do legitimately.
This concept is called the monopoly of force or of violence, and it is one of the assumptions that lie beneath laws that require gun owners, for example, to keep firearms unloaded and locked up or that forbid the possession of offensive weapons in public—take as an illustration such devices that under British law are any “tool made, adapted or intended for the purpose of inflicting physical injury upon another person.” To make oneself ready to defend one’s life is treated as intent to do harm, an act that in this theory of society belongs only to the state as a whole.
There is some good sense in the principle of a monopoly of legitimate violence residing in the state. Its early formulation came at a time when the various lords of lands nominally under a king’s rule had their own private armies was something in living memory or in direct observation of anyone looking about Europe. And such entities as the Wagner Group or the Mercenaries Formerly Known as Blackwater show that humanity has not yet fully adopted the idea that the national government should have the only military within the country’s sovereign borders—and those two are blessedly infamous for how much they stand out of the norm in Europe or the United States. Continents such as Africa are plagued with private armies—including the Wagner Group—that undermine the stability of central authorities.
At the same time, I have only to mention Philando Castile or Breonna Taylor or the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War, among so many similar cases, to call into question whether government is capable of using violence competently or in a manner that respects human rights. A monopoly of force depends on the wielders of that force being able to say that they only act when justified and that when they do act, they achieve results that do not suggest thoughts of looking elsewhere for our defenders.
We do need to ask just how much we are willing to accept to make competence a practical reality. Do we want police officers to be within our line of sight at all times? Do we want said cops to be seconds away from us no matter where we are? A police state creates at least the appearance of security, but what freedoms exist in such a state?
Incidents of shoplifting and of stabbings in places like San Francisco or London illustrate what happens when ordinary people are denied the realistic ability to defend themselves and their property from attacks if there is no omnipresent police force. Advocates of gun control will see a desire for vigilante justice here, but the fact is that while we can do many things to reduce the factors that drive crime, deterrence and defense will always be necessary so long as anyone feels entitled to initiate violence against people who are just going about their daily business. Unless we want to live in a police state, some of that deterrence and defense will of necessity be the job of ordinary citizens.
But a monopoly of force has another flaw, one more fundamental than such practical concerns. A democratic state that as a matter of law respects individual rights is one that separates itself from many acts of violence, that draws a line tighter than perhaps ordinary morality might indicate as to how much force it may use. More than that, such a state opens itself to the use of force in the form of the vote to the citizens of that country. In a functioning democracy, the people choose our leaders and—indirectly in a representative democracy, to be sure—our laws. This monopoly of force is thereby supposed to be provisional, a monopoly that can be transferred periodically at the pleasure of the people. And it must be exclusive in some respects. Various levels of government in recent decades in the United States have been using private military contractors to get around public disapproval of wars and private prisons to hand off tax dollars to the cronies of government officials, but these are a surrender of the monopoly.
In a just society, this monopoly is not of violence in all forms. It is instead a concentration of such use of force as is done by our collective will. As a nation, we say that a given defendant is found guilty after due process of law and must be punished essentially by all of us acting together. As a nation, we say that our national interests, expressed under international law, require us to use force against another nation. As a nation, we say that force of the kind that only all of us together can exercise ought to be employed.
For a society to be just, we must recognize the distinction between individual and collective force. And we must exercise the appropriate level of caution in both kinds of force, resorting to those means only when we are being wronged and can resolve the situation no other way.
The notion that a monopoly on legitimate violence must be in the hands of (agents of) the state rests on a willful misreading of Weber on two points.
First, Weber was attempting to be descriptive rather than prescriptive: he was trying to come up with a practical definition of what constitutes a "state."
Second, the criterion he came up with did not state that the means of violence should be limited to agents of the state (though he arguably expressed himself clunkily by calling it "das Gewaltmonopol des Staates," which lent itself too easily to misinterpretation). Rather, Weber's point was that "the state" is the entity that has the power to decide in a binding fashion whether or not a particular use of violence is legitimate. Thus, if the state says "it is legal for private citizens to use lethal force to stop an imminent threat of permanent injury or death, and they may legally possess the means to inflict lethal violence for that purpose," and agents of the state (police, prosecutors, judges) get to decide whether a particular use of lethal force meets that exemption, the state is meeting Weber's criterion of what it is to be a state.