New Critical Writings in Political Sociology

Volume One: Power, State and Inequality

Kate Nash, Alan Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754627500
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351964302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first volume of the series covers the key themes of political sociology as these have emerged in the course of the (sub-)discipline's development: state formation; legitimation; power; regulation, and inequality. The widening of the focus of political sociology from the nation-state and from models of power based on agents' wills and explicit agendas is reflected in the selection. The volume includes both 'standard' and highly-influential contributions - such as Elias on violence, Habermas on legitimation crisis or Lukes on power - and works that are perhaps less well known, but which represent a representative cross-section of themes and debates in the area. The historical formation of the state and its shifting spatial reach are covered in the first and final sections respectively. In between, both substantial issues - e.g. the changing nature of social policy and welfare regimes - and a wide range of theoretical and conceptual issues - are discussed by leading representative of the vying positions within the field.

Part I
State Formation

[1]
CIVILIZATION AND VIOLENCE: ON THE STATE MONOPOLY OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE AND ITS INFRINGEMENTS¹

by Norbert Elias

Civilization is never finished and always endangered. It is endangered, for the maintenance of civilized standards of behavior depends on certain conditions such as a relatively stable level of individual self-discipline. This in turn is linked to specific social structures. The supplying of goods, the preservation of the accustomed standard of living are among them, and especially social pacification, i.e., the non-violent settling of conflicts within the state. But the internal pacification of society is always endangered by social and personal conflicts which are among the normal phenomena of social life — precisely the conflicts which the pacifying institutions serve to settle. Because of undeclared presuppositions, when studying the problem of physical violence in social life, the question is often posed in such a way that the answer cannot do justice to the observable contexts. Consider the following two examples.

One of the false ways of posing the problem is connected with the currently widespread tendency to ascribe social conflicts and the resulting psychological conflicts to people’s innate aggressiveness. The idea that persons have an aggression drive to attack other persons, resembling in its structure other innate drives such as, for instance, the sexual drive, is unfounded. People do have an innate potential to automatically shift their whole physical apparatus to a different gear if they feel endangered. The body reacts to the experience of danger by an automatic adjustment which prepares the way for intensive movement of the skeletal muscles, such as for combat or flight. Human impulses that correspond to the model of a drive are released physiologically or, as is often said, “from within,” relatively independently of the respective situation. The shifting of the body’s economy to combat- or flight-readiness is to a far greater extent conditioned by a specific situation, whether present here and now, or remembered. The aggressiveness-potential can be activated by natural and social situations of a certain kind, i.e., mainly by conflict situation. In conscious contraposition to Lorenz and others who ascribe an aggression-drive to people on the model of the sexual drive, it is not aggressiveness that triggers conflicts but conflicts that trigger aggressiveness. Our habits of thought generate the expectation that everything we seek to explain about people can be explained in terms of isolated individuals. It is evidently hard to adjust thinking and thus also the explanatory expectation on the basis of how people are interconnected in groups, i.e., on the basis of social structures. Conflicts are an aspect of social structures. They are, furthermore, an aspect of human life together with animals, plants, moon and sun, i.e., with non-human nature. People are by nature attuned to this life together with other people and nature and the conflicts it entails.

The changed formulation of the question suggested by this is manifested in yet another more significant respect. When one studies the problem of physical violence, the question is often how it is possible that people often strike or kill others, that they become, for example, male or female terrorists. It would be more accurate, and hence also more productive, if the question were posed differently. It should go: how is it possible that so many people normally can live together peacefully without fear of being struck or killed by stronger ones —- as peacefully as is generally the case in the great state-societies of Europe, America, China or Russia in our day. It is all too often overlooked today that never before in the development of mankind have so many people, millions of them, lived together so peacefully, i.e., with considerable elimination of physical violence, as in the big states and cities of our time. It is perhaps seen only when one realizes how much more violent, how much higher the danger-level of physical attacks was in earlier epochs of human development.

The primary behavior, when one runs into conflict, when one gets angry at someone, when one hates — the primary behavior in cases of conflict is for people to attack each other and to strike or murder each other, as the case may be. The problem is how we can live together although all this — fury at one another, hatred, enmity, rivalry. All this is still there, but attacks or even murder have generally fallen to the background. At present, the question generally focuses on acts of violence. It asks how they can be explained. Instead, first we ought to ask how it can be explained that we normally live together so peacefully within a state-society. Only then is it really possible to explain and to understand how people cannot submit to the standard of a normally quite peaceful social life, the civilized standard of our days.

Now, the question of how it came about that we live together relatively peacefully in very large social groups is not especially hard to answer. It is a particular form of organization that has made it possible. One aspect of the problem was first seen by Max Weber. He pointed out that states are characterized by the respective rulers’ claiming a monopoly on physical violence. This means that we live in an organization where rulers have at their disposal groups of specialists authorized to use physical violence, if necessary, to prevent all other citizens from using violence. This monopolization of violence, for whose development I have presented an explanatory model in the second part of my book of civilization, is a socio-technical invention. For there are inventions not only in the natural but also in the social field — precisely socio-technical inventions, which generally develop without planning in the course of many generations. The monopolization of physical violence is an invention of this sort; it took shape very gradually over centuries until it reached the present state, which is not the last stage. Clearly, this monopoly of physical violence within any one state cannot be said to function without problems.

Such monopolies of physical violence, which at present are usually controlled and managed by national governments and represented by the military and police as their executive organs are, like so many human inventions, very ambiguous. Just as the taming of fire favored the civilizing progress of cooking food as well as the barbarian burning down of huts and houses, just as atomic energy is both a plentiful source of energy and a terrible weapon, the social invention of the monopoly of physical violence is equally ambiguous. It is a dangerous instrument. From the old Pharaos down to present dictatorships, the disposal over the monopoly of violence is used for the benefit of some small groups. But the function for its controllers is not the only function of the state monopoly of power. It also has a highly significant function for people bound together in a state. Our pacification, the relatively collective peaceful life of large masses of people is in good part based on this institution, which is closely connected with fiscal monopoly.² The most important thing is the balance between the two functions of the monopoly of violence: the function for its controllers and for the members of the state or society, i.e., internal pacification. In former times the power-balance was so unevenly distributed that the controllers of the monopoly of power could in its exercize give unrestricted priority to its function for themselves over its function for those they ruled. Louis XIV is reported to have said: “I am the State.” He in fact felt himself to be an owner. Since then the balance of power has shifted in a few states in favor of the function of the monopoly of power for the whole state-society.

Individual pacification, the fact that for most of us in a conflict the idea never even enters our heads to rush at our opponent and begin a brawl, however angry we may be, testifies to a far-reaching civilizing transformation of the whole structure of personality. Babies, to whatever society they may belong, protect themselves spontaneously hand and foot. Children like to wrestle and box. That the taboo against acts of violence is so deeply impressed upon adolescents in developed state-societies, is in good part connected with the growing effectiveness of the state monopoly of power. In the course of time the personality structures of individuals adjust to this. They develop a certain reluctance or even deep repulsion — a kind of disgust for the use of physical violence. The progress of this process can be oulined. In former times, as recently as the 19th century, it was in many strata quite acceptable for men to strike women in order to have their way. Today, the imperative that men may under no circumstances strike women — nor one another, even when they are stronger — or that even children may not be struck, is far more deeply anchored in individuals’ feelings than in earlier centuries. Only when this generally self-activated restraint of spontaneous impulses to acts of violence in civilized state-societies becomes conscious is the problem of intentional and reflected acts of violence cast in the right light.

There are within states violent legal groups and violent illegal groups. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is no monopoly of power on the international level. On the international level, today we are living just as our forefathers did. As tribes were earlier a danger to other tribes, so states today are still a constant danger to other states. Their members and representatives must always be on guard, must always reckon with the possibility of being invaded by a stronger state and brought into dependency, perhaps even subjection to it. On the international level there is no higher-ranking power to prevent the stronger state from invading a weaker state to demand taxes and obedience from its citizens and so de facto annexing the weaker state. No one can prevent one mighty state from doing so except another mighty state. And if there are such states, then they live in constant fear of one another, in the fear that the other state could become stronger and mightier. Their rivalry spurs each to become stronger than the other. Often, the inevitability of the entanglement is not seen clearly enough, because one usually stands on one side. At any rate, it is one of the normal cases of international relations for the respectively strongest states to be involved in hegemonial struggles with one another, in part, precisely because they live in constant fear of one another. On this level, there is no central monopoly of physical violence to restrain any one of the participants from an act of violence if they believe themselves stronger and hope for advantages from it. That is how it often was in former times even within states. The stronger neighbor had to be feared. The one who was physically stronger could use his strength to threaten, extort, rob and enslave others.

The pacification and civilization of people within a state has progressed. In this regard, a strange crevice divides our civilization. When the word “civilization” is used, it is often assumed that it refers to a homogeneous entity. That is not the case. There is a very sharp distinction between the standard of civilized behavior and feeling in domestic as contraposed to international relations. In domestic relations, violence among people is taboo and, if possible, punished; in international relations a different standard prevails. Every larger state continuously prepares for acts of violence against other states; and when such acts of violence are carried out, those who carry them out stand in especially high esteem; they are often praised and rewarded. If the lessening of physical dangers, i.e., the diminished mutual threat or increased pacification, is taken as one of the decisive criteria for the graduated stages of civilization, then mankind can be said to have reached a higher state of civilization within domestic affairs than on the international level. In the case of more developed industrial states, which domestically they are often almost totally pacified, the difference between domestic pacification and international threat is especially great. In international relations, people are still on a relatively low level of the process of civilization, not because they are evil by nature nor because they all have innate aggressive desires, but because they have developed certain social institutions within the state which can more or less effectively stop every act of violence not authorized by that state, while such institutions are still completely missing in international relations. Domestically, there is a monopoly of violence with whose help it is normally possible to restrict violent conflicts. On the international level, the monopolization of violence is still a long way off. The early steps toward such a development, the efforts of the United Nations or of the International Court at The Hague for a non-violent settlement of conflicts on the international plane, show these weaknesses all too clearly. An army stronger than the states preparing for a violent conflict or engaged in violent activities would be needed to prevent them from settling their conflicts militarily. If such an army existed, then the United Nations and other international institutions would possess a global monopoly of physical violence. Since such a monopoly does not exist, international relations in many ways do not match the relations of simpler groups of people in the jungle. All larger and many smaller states constantly keep ready specialists in violence, who can be used when violent invasion by another state threatens or, as the case may be, when one’s own state threatens to invade another.³

While on the international level the formation of a monopoly of physical violence, i.e., the process of a state-formation, is quite rudimentary, the development of such a monopoly-institution on the domestic level has progressed much further, but not everywhere at the same pace. Even where it is relatively effective, it remains vulnerable. In the crisis-situations of a society the state-authorized specialists in violence, the representatives of the state monopoly on violence, become involved in a violent struggle with groups not authorized by the state. Consider a few examples from recent German history.

It would be a beautiful task to write the biography of a state-society such as Germany. For just as in an individual’s development experiences from earlier times continue to effect the present, the same is true of nations. Thus, the experience that the German Reich was for a long time a weak state and occupied a relatively low position in the hierarchy of European states is still alive today in Germany’s present development. When the Reich was weak, the self-respect of the member nations suffered. Their sense of self-value was damaged. One can still see in the documents of 17th and 18th century Germany how often people then felt and experienced that Germany was weak, e.g., compared with France, England, Sweden, or Russia, because it was fragmentated.

A biography of Germany would have to describe how this feeling of weakness and inferiority turned suddenly into its opposite, when the formerly loose confederation was finally consolidated into an integrated state as the result of a victorious war. The feeling of weakness turned into a boundless feeling of power and the inferiority complex into an unparalled self-esteem. Now, the pendulum swung too much in the opposite direction. Germany, entering the magic circle of the European great powers, now became involved in their hegemonial struggles. In accord with the dynamics of the European configuration of states, now in Germany too — already under the second Kaiser and in an especially radical form because this development came later — the idea spread that it was not enough for this country by its unification to have won a place as one of the European great powers; beyond that it had to become the main power in Europe and a world power. In accord with this swing of the pendulum from extreme humiliation to extreme exaltation, more and more people in the leading groups felt that Germany had to prepare for a struggle to dominate Europe, if not the whole world.

Of course, few great powers on this earth hav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I State Formation
• Part II Constitutionalism and Legitimation
• Part III Power
• Part IV Regulation, Governmentality and Governance
• Part V Inequality, Social Policy and Class Politics
• Part VI Global Inequalities and Their Effects
• Part VII Spatial Aspects of Governance: State Spaces and Reach
• Name Index