{"id":27684,"date":"2014-09-04T09:19:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-04T14:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27684"},"modified":"2014-09-04T09:19:26","modified_gmt":"2014-09-04T14:19:26","slug":"the-very-essence-of-government-is-a-monopoly-on-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/09\/04\/the-very-essence-of-government-is-a-monopoly-on-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"The very essence of government is a monopoly on violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley<\/a> on how governments came about historically and how ISIS is trying to do exactly the same thing:<\/p>\n

Nobody seems to agree whether Islamic State is best described as a gang of criminals, a terrorist organisation or a religious movement. It clearly has a bit of all three. But don\u2019t forget that it aspires, for better or worse, to be a government. A brutal, bigoted and murderous government, its appeal is at least partly that it seems capable of imposing its version of \u201corder\u201d on the territory it controls, however briefly. It reminds us that the origin and defining characteristic of all government is that it is an organisation with a monopoly on violence.<\/p>\n

The deal implicit in being governed is at root a simple one: we allow the people who govern us to have an exclusive right to commit violence, so long as they direct it at other countries and at criminals. In almost every nation, if you go back far enough, government began as a group of thugs who, as Pope Gregory VII put it<\/a> in 1081, \u201craised themselves up above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder \u2014 in short by every kind of crime\u201d.<\/p>\n

Was Canute, or William the Conqueror, or Oliver Cromwell really much different from the Islamic State? They got to the top by violence and then violently dealt with anybody who rebelled. The American writer Albert Jay Nock in 1939 observed: \u201cThe idea that the state originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation \u2014 that is to say, in crime … No state known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henry VII, the monarch who managed, after a century of gang warfare, to establish a monopolistic central government in England, funded his administration largely by extorting money from rich merchants with the threat of violence. That is to say, he ran a protection racket as blatant as any mafia don or IRA commander: pay up or lose your kneecaps.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley on how governments came about historically and how ISIS is trying to do exactly the same thing: Nobody seems to agree whether Islamic State is best described as a gang of criminals, a terrorist organisation or a religious movement. It clearly has a bit of all three. But don\u2019t forget that it aspires, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,7,370],"tags":[982,112],"class_list":["post-27684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-history","category-middle-east","tag-isis","tag-organizedcrime"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7cw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27685,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27684\/revisions\/27685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}