The Inevitable Paradox of State Coercion
Sam Routley, “The Inevitable Paradox of State Coercion: The Late Charles Tully Provides an Important Lesson for Today’s State Builders,” The Vital Center 1, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 21–25.
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Can politics ever rise above self-interest and triviality? The answer, it seems, is not on this side of heaven. Management, or careful use of, coercion is key to a stable, functioning, and socially empowering state. Not because it is ideal, but because there is no other way.
The neoliberal epoch is over. Most liberals—particularly those of the right-leaning or conservative form—have realized that their prior goals of minimal state interference in the economic market, about individual discretion, and about reliance on personal morality are both unattainable and undesirable. It has become apparent that, in contrast to stated political goals, the state has not actually gotten all that much smaller. Contemporary voices on the right, therefore, are increasingly coming to see the state as more than just a necessary evil and to challenge the claim that it can ever really be neutral; that it is not just a practical tool for advancing a limited set of collective goods but something that ought to be approached as a component part of a virtuous social order. These shifts point to a need to reengage with the state as a real-world structure, as more than something that just ought to be tolerated. The state, for better or worse, needs to be seen for what it is: as an institution that originates and continues to source its power from a dynamic of social violence. This entails that, when it comes to examining the ideal use of state power, the pressing question is not about whether coercion can be removed, so much as about how it can be best used and managed.
Modern Liberal Democracy not only emerged as a response to the state’s growing power but is in large part a project that aims to redirect these coercive mechanisms toward more productive and socially empowering ends. And, while flawed, it remains the most effective and historically successful means at our disposal for securing a stable and equal set of state institutions. Nevertheless, to better refine a useful liberal model for the proper role of the state, we need to move past the abstract and bloodless approach of most contemporary liberal theory, and better incorporate the far more complex and contested way the state has developed and operated in practice as a product of history.
If the nation-state monopolizes the “legitimate” use of violence over a given territory, then what is it really for? Many overlook the fact that it is a very recent form of political organization. In contrast to the decentralized empires and city-states of most human history, it emerged from early modern Europe to make several political innovations: it has come close to effectively monopolizing the use of systematic violence within its territory, it has attached individuals to its institutions through its “imagined communities,” and it has—to borrow James C. Scott’s words— made society legible. The state possesses both the enormous capacity and knowledge of on-the-ground conditions necessary to order social and economic life toward its ends.
Several have argued that the primacy of the state was bound to be eclipsed by some other form, whether global capital, world government, or the universal, homogenous condition. But these have all been premature predictions because, despite a more crowded global space, international governmental organizations and corporations have failed to gather the same level of knowledge and underlying coercive capacity. Our collective experience of the pandemic made that much clearer. And the continual expression of seemingly powerless states to contest international economic trends is, rather than indicating a larger role for corporations, instead better attributed to the continual dominance of the world’s most powerful states in active collaboration with capital— advancing their own interests over those of their weaker peers, just as they always have done.
Still, the abstract and normative approach of most of today’s discourse around the state provides a sterilized, ahistorical, and bloodless simulacrum of political contestation. It insists that a state’s behavior can be controlled through the intentional design of its internal machinery, whether constitutional outlines, principles of judicial interpretation, bureaucratic capacity, or the quality of those elected to its office. This overlooks the fact that, historically, the state has been shaped just as much by repression, naked self-interest, and perennial contestation. Many of the characteristics of the contemporary state have not been secured through effective institutional organization but have been won through violence.
Given this, the late sociologist Charles Tilly’s provocative approach is particularly useful for understanding exactly what the state is. Comparing them to criminal rackets, he argued that states are in the business of “protection” from threats both genuine and manufactured. While the organization has pursued several ends over time, state authority functions on its ability to coerce, to disproportionally influence the behavior of agents by hurting those who dissent. “War making and state making” says Tilly, “qualify as our largest example of organized crime.”
Tilly provides a more realistic framework for engagement that should be heeded by today’s political entrepreneurs. It manages to get to the roots: the bare, elemental material that the state uses to advance a set of objectives. His claim that “war made the state, and states make war” remains an analytical locus by which to emphasize the central point that the basic orientation of the state is power, coercion, and exploitation (Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”). War is its main business; in doing this business, it has and will continue to both coopt the interests of the dominant economic class and placate territorial populations through benefits in exchange for revenue. It also exposes the staying power of the modern state: that, although grounded in violence, it has proved to be an indispensable agent of considerable social empowerment.
“Tilly’s claim that ‘war made the state, and states make war’ remains an analytical locus by which to emphasize the central point that the basic orientation of the state is power, coercion, and exploitation.”
Tilly focuses on the “central, tragic fact” of coercion; that it “works” because “those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance, and from that compliance draw the multiple advantages of money, goods, deference, access to pleasures” (“War Making and State Making,” 70). Power is compelled through violence, with ideas of legitimacy or endowment constructed after the fact, as populations are either “bought off” with economic wellbeing and security or “persuaded” through more norm-based appeals. Models of the Social Contract, market logic, or impact of shared norms do not suffice as an explanation of real historical and contemporary scenarios. Instead, the struggle over instruments of coercion is what matters. All political organizations with any real sense of authority—whether tribal warlords, military dictators, monarchs, or elected presidents— are the same; power belongs to whomever takes it and can defend it. The state exists today because it is a winner, as global history is littered with the remains of the losers of this process—the countless warlords, princes, rebels, and city-states that no longer exist.
This is not an entirely novel insight per se; indeed, it is that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. But Tilly draws important insights from his own historical analysis of how the nation-state and its ever-increasing set of functions emerged from Europe through a highly contingent process (Coercion, Capital, and European States). His basic claim is that the essentially contested nature of coercion motivated ever escalating warfare over control, which in the European experience, motivated a technological, administrative, and militaristic competitive edge: while the losers quite literally ceased to exist, the winners were, in the aggregate, left with greater internal and external control over their areas of domain.
Fifteenth-century miniature of the Battle of Agincourt, during the Hundred Years’ War.
What marks the state as a distinctive form of political organization is its ability to draw a rigid distinction between the “internal” and “external” spheres of political power (“War Making and State Making”). It can secure and maintain exclusive control and administration over a territory while also establishing a clear, defensible territorial border of that authority. This is a break from the past. Previously, the expense of administration entailed that coercive political power of any substantial size had to be indirectly operated through independent interlocutors. This included both large-scale empires that, while centered around urban areas, governed most of the then-rural populations though local powerholders, and city-states that developed ad-hoc and fragmented coalitions when necessary. Even the Romans, for all their administrative prowess, had to rely on local magnates and faced barbarian incursions over their porous borders.
The modern state, in contrast, emerged from the moment that rulers were able to establish direct control by assimilating interlocutors directly into its organization. It allowed for increasing “invasions of small-scale social life” that have, with ebbs and flows over time, continued into the contemporary period (“War Making and State Making,” 25). This development, says Tilly, is the product of war. What matters for the emergence of the state as a unique form of political organization is the question of resource extraction: exactly how rulers were able to finance ever more expensive warfare. States learned how to establish direct control because they had to do so to survive.
This effective distinction between external and internal politics, as defined through a ruler’s direct control over coercive and extractive instruments, was simply the cost of doing business: a means extracting more resources from subject populations to finance military confrontations with competitors. The alternative was to perish, entailing that rulers were in the position to grant any concessions necessary to co-opt or placate their populations into this extractive process. Anything else, including a role for the state beyond coercion, war making, and the ruler’s personal interest, was unintentional.
The costs of direct oversight required most rulers to turn to the cooptation of economic elites—loosely understood as those who control capital—into a larger process. This underlines, for insight into contemporary statecraft, the necessary interconnectedness of political coercion, economic production, and the power of mutual political-capital interest. Safety has its benefits and associated incentives, not only in terms of personal security, but the way in which it can organize the extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of objects in nature.
Nonetheless, Tilly argues that other social segments outside of the elite were eventually coopted into the life of the state as, in return for providing their resources, they got concessions. Effectively, it meant that the state’s continual oversight over lives—while originally meant for more private ends—was redirected toward more positive and mutually-enriching goals. In fact, it meant that the broader status apparatus, its personnel, and the society it coopted, eventually came to win control from the initial rulers themselves.
Even in the medieval period, Europe contained an assortment of constitutional orders as monarchs received pushback from nobles, capitalists, and municipalities that called for political rights and representation. But later movements, proceeding throughout the Reformation and Enlightenment, included much more violent contestation and displacement. And, while some managed to work out stable social settlements, it was also common to see continual instability— between ideologies, individuals, or social segments—over control of the state’s machinery.
The state is enduringly flexible, because it was through this process of contestation that the organization came to be seen as something beyond the dictates of a particular ruler. The great ideologies of the last centuries—nationalism, liberalism, communism, and fascism—did not create the modern state, as much as they developed as responses to it. They sought to determine the extent to which the organization can transcend its basis in coercion and be used for some broader social or philosophical good. And, to this end, they have had mixed successes. Although totalitarianism was a threat, no one can deny the inextricable role that the state has played in making the average person’s life more secure and comfortable, even under neoliberalism.
But it cannot be said that the state has managed to somehow transcend its nature of coercion and violence, in addition to the competitive process that shapes its growth and behavior. War has not declined as much as it has taken on new dimensions within the broader state system. In particular, the continuing growth of particularly successful states has transitioned global politics from one of anarchy to superpowers that can now actively interfere in the internal lives of others. This allowed for both colonialism and the imposition of largely inappropriate political forms over other global regions.
“Failed” or otherwise weak states, for instance, continue to exist because the existential threat of external competition is now much less severe: internal organizations and dominant powers for the most part enforce (in some case arbitrary) borders and prevent state death. In this way, the incentive for many local political elites, rather than increasing the territorial, administrative, economic, and symbolic capacity of their organizations, is to remain “predatory” and exploit the short-term awards of their positions. Political stability either operates through extensive patronage networks or is unable (even unwilling) to contain localized “warlords” that rely on external support networks.
Tilly’s account is empirical, and it reveals how the state operates in practice regardless of our normative preferences. Coercion is unavoidable: political power is the question of how it is best managed or oriented toward more positive and socially empowering ends, avoiding the influence of more negative actors. The state is clearly better than mobsters, or bandits, or corporate overlords. Both the empowering and repressive elements of the state are embedded in an enduring tension.
This does not mean that just institutions and norms are unattainable, but it does say that they must be continually fought for: the tendency of the state to slide toward coercion, collusion with economic elites, and expansive war making need to be resisted. If any one individual or group could take and maintain absolute control of the state, they would. Can politics ever rise above self-interest and triviality? The answer, it seems, is not on this side of heaven. Management, or careful use of, coercion is key to a stable, functioning, and socially empowering state. Not because it is ideal, but because there is no other way.
