The Legitimacy of Violence

Abstract

In this chapter, we return to Weber, for whom state monopolization included the ‘legitimate’ use of violence. The goal is to explore the potential for a post Weberian understanding of political legitimacy which would de-couple legitimization processes from order, command and obedience, crucial components of Weberian political legitimacy. The discussion of political legitimacy remains strongly influenced by Weber’s grounding of it in subjective belief in the validity of an order, which is also objectively validated as a social fact. This includes willing, non coerced, acceptance, of an order which also ‘orders’ violence through the state monopoly. For Weber, political domination is then legitimated by virtue of a belief in the right of the ‘ruler’ to rule and use violence in the process. In the modern state this is underpinned by legally binding rules. The latter are part of the construction of legitimacy, but are also imbued with varied and selective understandings of violence. By analyzing separately the legitimacy of violence from legality and claims to the justice of violence (discussed in the following chapter), this chapter is not ignoring the importance of legality to Weber’s understanding of modern political legitimacy. Rather it is arguing that if legitimacy is to be decoupled from force, coercion and violence, then it is first of all necessary to explore how and why violence remains embedded in political orders considered to be ‘legitimate’. This enables us to appreciate the differentiating social constructions of violence and its rightfulness, also connected to its meaning laden and generating qualities. This chapter explores, therefore, how ‘legitimate’ politics as well as the State tend to be silent on the violences that remain within the order and are in turn ordered by it. This generates meanings of violence which construct their ‘rightfulness’, reducing our sensibilities to and normalizing our selective acceptance of violence. In principle, however, the concept of legitimacy (and justice and legality) could also be associated with meanings and actions to de-sanction and designify violence. The legitimacy of the State could alternatively be founded on a process of responding to and in turn contributing to, evolving sensibilities towards and knowledge of violence reproduction and its reduction. Such a view of political legitimacy addresses some of the weaknesses in Weber’s formulation, but also, it is argued, would contribute to an understanding of politics as predicated on opening it to forms of interaction which do not involve somatic harm, and which thus extend participation in processes of legitimacy building, aimed, in turn at addressing the factors which reproduce violence.