The four monopolies of the modern state

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from pre-modernity to modernity. As I shall argue in the next chapter, the always gradual and never-ending character of modern statehood – our inability to locate, in a fully exhaustive manner, all of the defined attributes of statehood ‘out there’, i.e. the necessary discrepancy between ideal-types and real world entities – motivates us to operate with alternative terms such as ‘state-crafting’, which alludes to the always already ongoingness of statehood, the artful and always unfinished making of stateness.

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related important implication: its irreducible quality, the fact of it being more than the sum of its constituent parts, provides the social-theoretical condition for its both organizational and institutional presence. On the one hand, the state has an organizational existence – it is present, and comes into existence in its gross form, not only as a particular type of empirically recognizable social association with a limited membership (Verband), but as a compulsory association (Anstalt), marked by

‘[c]ontinuous rational activity’ (Betrieb) and with a, at least when speaking of modern organizations,

‘continuously and rationally operating Staff’ – that is, as an Anstaltsbetrieb (Weber 1978: 48-56; see also Dusza 1989: 76). On the other hand, the state has an institutional existence – it is present, and comes into existence in its abstract form, as a less directly empirically observable matrix of historically institutionalized (formal or informal) rules, structures and functional patterns. While the former dimension alludes to the more materially anchored organizational aspects of the state’s actorness, the latter points to the abstract cluster of enabling and constraining forces linked to the institutional presence of the state.

It follows from this important dual characterization that the state’s immediate empirical-organizational presence cannot exhaust the category of the state. While, as discussed, Weber actually had a much more sophisticated conception of the institutional and historically variegated structural and functional properties of the state, the otherwise productive so-called neo-Weberian conception of statehood, as for example launched by Tilly (1990) or in Evans et al. (1985a) cannot be considered optimal precisely because it tends to reduce statehood to its organizational presence. Since, in this view, states are ‘conceived as organizations’ (Skocpol 1985: 9), neo-Weberian scholars are constantly on the lookout for ‘specific organizational structures’ (Evans et al. 1985b: 351). In this view, the organizational practices of the state sufficiently constitute, or exhaust, the state. While this definitional approach at first glance seems perfectly meaningful, it tends to perceive a necessary aspect of statehood – its organizational presence – as also a sufficient aspect. Thus, as argued, while the state necessarily exists as an organizational entity it also necessarily exists as an emergent institutional structure.

More generally, the neo-Weberian conception remains suboptimal because its implied empiricism makes it fail to appreciate the varying institutional modes of sovereignty; it makes it difficult to grasp the emergent and relatively immediately unobservable institutional power of the state underpinning and operating across different concrete organizational modes of actuality. Ultimately, as I shall argue, in order to understand the ‘state-crafting’ logic underpinning the turn to governance, it is necessary to also

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recognize the abstract quality of statehood – that is, its existence as an immediately unobservable emergent corporate-institutional structure. In sum, in line with the distinction made in the beginning of this chapter, one can say that the above three-dimensional state entity has two overlapping and individually insufficient ontological forms of actuality.

Within a certain relatively circumscribed territory, having a relatively permanent population, state power appears, or is activated, through what may be described as four types of monopolies: 1) A force monopoly; 2) A bureaucratic monopoly; 3) A fiscal monopoly; 4) A symbolic monopoly.¹¹²

1) According to Weber (1978: 54), an absolutely essential, that is both historically and conceptually necessary, characteristic of the state is its (or its staff’s) ability to ‘successfully [uphold]

the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’.

Importantly, the Weberian force monopoly centers on the domestic arena: the unique ability of the state to authoritatively concentrate and manage the use of physical force within the territorial domain sets it apart from other potentially competing internal groups (social classes or other corporate entities).

Through the state’s monopolization of force, violence is ‘not eliminated from society, but is deposited and stored in a separate domain of its own’ (Dusza 1989: 88).

2) According to Weber (1978: 52), the modern state is a compulsory organizational enterprise (Anstaltsbetrieb) – that is, a historically speaking, and ultimately, involuntary formal organization with

‘a continuously and rationally operating Staff’. That it has a ‘rationally operating staff’ does not imply a superior form of knowledge or extreme strategic capacity but merely that state agents formally strive to rationally and administratively optimize decision-making processes. In the Weberian conception, the modern state concentrates ‘the means of administration’ (Weber 1948: 221) and ‘possesses an administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation’ (Weber 1978: 56). In Bourdieu’s (1994:

4, emphasis removed) historical-theoretical account, the modern state is conceived as the historical

‘culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital’ (physical, economic, cultural, etc.). This historical concentration has constituted the state as a bureaucratic ‘meta-field’ in possession of ‘statist capital’ (or ‘meta-capital’), which ‘enables the state to exercise power over the different fields and over the different particular species of capital, and especially over the rates of conversion between them’ (Ibid.: 4). For Bourdieu, the ‘statist capital’ is the modern state’s own distinctive type of power, namely the power to, in an authoritative way, bureaucratically organize and structure action through

112 See more generally Elias (1982: 268-276) on the generic logic of the ’monopoly mechanism’.

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mobilizing resources and juridically regulating the relations of force between other (potentially competing) social entities.¹¹³ In this sense, the state’s bureaucratic monopoly consists in its both unmatched capacity for, and authority with regards to, bureaucratic (or rational-legal) social organization.

3) Following Elias (1982: 104, 110) – and implicitly a range of other notable historical scholars (e.g., Tilly 1990; Schulze 1995; Hart 1995; Bonney 1999b) – another essential dimension of modern statehood is the state’s legitimate ‘monopoly of taxation’, that is, the situation in which the ‘taxation of the property or income of individuals is concentrated in the hands of a central social authority’.

Importantly, more than simply centralized tax collection, the modern state relies on an overall fiscal infrastructure: it manages systematic budgetary activities and controls and sanctions fiscal institutions.

Here, a decisive budgetary expression of the shift towards a public fiscal monopoly is the moment when

‘[t]he wielder of central power, whatever title he may bear, is allocated a sum in the budget like any other functionary’ (Elias 1982: 110). In other words, the modern state is not simply a tax state but a fiscal state. One can refer to this broader fiscal dimension as the legitimate monopoly of fiscal activity, or simply a fiscal monopoly.

4) Following Bourdieu (1994, 2005), the bureaucratic modern state possesses a ‘monopoly on symbolic power’. The genesis of the bureaucratic modern state, in Bourdieu’s (2005: 51) scheme, is the story of a historical ‘monopolization of the universal’ – a process enabled by, inter alia, a class of newly bred civil servants, particularly jurists, self-interestedly carving out an exclusive ‘public’ domain.

Historically, states have been able to ‘influence the language and symbolism of legitimacy’ (Cerny 1990: 33), (at least indirectly help) shape the internal structure of the ‘social fabric’ (Ibid.: 32) and define ‘what the goals of the collective as a whole should be’ (Beetham 1991: 46). The state manifests its ‘symbolic capital’ through the production of relatively taken-for-granted cognitive classifications and categories of thought and practices of rule-setting, nomination, standardization, harmonization, etc.

113 Drawing loosely on the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘games’, Cerny (1990: 1, emphasis added) seems to be working from a similar perspective when observing that historically the state ‘came to constitute the overall pattern of games, the contextual framework within which games of other kinds were increasingly to be played’.

Also Touraine (1977: 218, emphasis added) in his own way supports this notion of the state as an (at least partly) autonomous agent of meta-structuring: ‘the state is the locus of the institutional system’s combination with the other social systems’.

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– processes fostered, like in Althusser’s (2012) more extreme theory of ideology, particularly through the educational system (Bourdieu 1994: 1).

In sum, besides being characterized by (1) an essential monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force (Weber), the modern state also has (2) a monopoly on the ‘means of administration’ (Weber) and

‘statist’ or ‘meta’ capital (Bourdieu), (3) a legitimate ‘monopoly of taxation’ (Elias) and fiscal activity more generally and (4) a ‘monopoly on symbolic power’ (Bourdieu).

It might make sense to specify what the monopoly dimension implies in this study. Importantly, as Buchanan (2002: 690, emphasis added) correctly points out, although a state always ‘attempts to establish the supremacy of [its] rules’, this ‘does not imply that there are no limits on state control’.

Rather, it ‘refers to the lack of a rival for the state’s making, application, and enforcement of law within an assumed jurisdiction’ (Ibid.). Critically, such an understanding is ‘compatible with the scope of the rules it imposes being limited’ (Ibid.).¹¹⁴ Moreover, states may easily engage in acts of delegation, prescription, licensing, dispensation, etc., without this necessarily undermining its monopoly position (see also Ibid.; Coleman 1974, 1982). The state is, as Coleman (1974: 29, 1982: 50, 37) puts it, a

‘special case’ or a ‘single exceptional corporate actor’ given inter alia the ‘particular allocation of rights’ authoritatively performed within or by the state. The state has, in this corporate understanding, a distinctive authoritative status in chartering or incorporating other corporate entities.

In other words, the lack of a pure monopoly, the fact of the state’s monopoly being usually somehow

‘limited’ – for example, in the case of the force monopoly, the existence of violent drug cartels in Mexico or Columbia effectively controlling some local areas or in the case of the fiscal monopoly, the existence of a ‘shadow economy’ amounting to roughly 20% of GDP in countries like Italy¹¹⁵ – does not a priori disqualify the notion of statehood or the basic monopoly understanding presented above.

Recalling the jointly applied ideal-type and ‘family resemblance’ perspectives – which, as outlined in chapter 4, fully accept conceptual degreeism and the empirical contingency of certain properties of a

114 One may add that ‘the lack of a rival’ is best interpreted as the lack of a real rival, as the depiction of a pure monopoly situation in mainstream microeconomic theory, where the market only has one supplier, rarely, if ever, matches reality. In many cases, we are dealing with a monopoly situation where minor competitors (however unimportant) exists, or a highly asymmetrical form of oligarchy.

115 For data on this, see Schneider (2013).

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category – it seems sufficient to say that the state has a more or less systematic relatively unmatched capacity and authority with regards to the relevant monopoly.

Clearly, roughly in line with Weber’s thinking (see more generally Anter 2014: 33), the distinctive constitutive authoritative status of the above four monopolies is both (1) dependent on the state’s concentration of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1994, 2005) – notably, the necessary constitutive role of symbolic power and symbolic violence in the historical formation of modern statehood – and (2) critically hinges on the material quality of the force monopoly (cf., e.g., Thorup 2015: 119).¹¹⁶ That said, while Weber (1978: 54) understood that ‘the use of physical force (…) is neither the sole, nor even the most usual, method of administration of political organizations’, he nevertheless stressed that the

‘threat of force, and in the case of need its actual use, is the method which is specific to political organizations and is always the last resort when others have failed’. In this Weberian-Schmittian sense, while, for example, taxation is plausibly most effectively exercised through a state monopoly, it is the original and underlying ultimate coercive or materially physical nature of the state that insures the authority of its fiscal monopoly.