The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581069.002

2 - The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009

Robin Wagner-Pacifici

Edited by

Austin Sarat and

Jennifer L. Culbert

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Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Jennifer L. Culbert: Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University

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Summary

What is required is thus a sovereignty, a force that is stronger than all the other forces in the world. But if the constitution of this force is, in principle, supposed to represent and protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the very outset, in an autoimmune fashion, and in a way that is … just as silent as it is unavowable. Silent and unavowable like sovereignty itself.

– Jacques Derrida, Rogues

All states are lethal by definition. Max Weber knew this, and in a 1918 speech to law students in Germany, “Politics as a Vocation,” he detailed this recognition by way of a definition. Assuring his audience that his lecture would disappoint them, he first announced that politics should be understood as the leadership of a political association, “hence today, of a state.” Hewing firmly to a sociological point of view, he eliminated the consideration of ends or goals in his definition of a state, because different states historically have had different ends. What defines a state for Weber is its means, and the means specific to all states is the use of physical force. Weber approvingly quotes Leon Trotsky to introduce this sociological definition of the state: “‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right” (78). Weber then provides two quick definitions of the state. The first defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (78).

Type: Chapter
Information: States of Violence
War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die
, pp. 25 - 50

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581069.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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