I occasionally come across the following objection to anarchism:
“We’ve already seen what life is like in places like Somalia where the state has collapsed, and it’s very bad, so we should have states instead of anarchism.”
You’ve probably seen some variation of this argument; maybe the place cited wasn’t Somalia but it almost certainly was a country populated by brown people whom, the critic implies, cannot govern themselves.
The problem with this argument is that it conflates #StateCollapse and #StateFailure with #anarchism, but I would argue that these are very different phenomena.
Historically, state failure is the norm rather than the exception—the vast majority of states that have ever existed no longer exist. Pour one out for the Avar Khaganate. But state collapse is pretty rare these days, and the example sine qua non is Somalia.
In 1991, the Somalis overthrew their dictator Siad Barre. In his absence, no one actor or faction could assert control, and the country descended into an extended period of decentralization and factional violence. It wasn’t until 2004 that the Transitional Federal Government was established, and then until 2012 when a permanent Federal Government of Somalia was inaugurated.
In the meantime, a variety of armed actors vied for control of some or all of the country: former military personnel-turned warlords, clan militias, the Islamic Courts Union and later al-Shabaab, etc. The government still doesn’t control the whole country—Somaliland has been de facto independent since 1991 and al-Shabaab still controls territory.
For many people, this is the quintessential example of anarchy as chaos.
To understand why this is wrong, let’s turn to German sociologist Max Weber’s classic definition of the state, this one from his work “Economy and Society”:
“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”
This is an idealized definition, and no state ever truly monopolizes violence in a given territory, so we might call some institutions more “state-like” than others on a spectrum. But the general idea is sound:
- The state is an institution. It’s an organization of people.
- The state is compulsory. If you’re in a territory controlled by a state, the state doesn’t give you a choice to opt out of its rule.
- The state enforces an order. It makes rules and expects you to follow those rules.
- The state uses violence to enforce those rules. The state doesn’t like anyone else in its territory using violence to enforce a different set of rules.
That last one often trips people up. People tend to hear “legitimacy” and think in terms of “valid” or “justified.” It conjures images of democratic validation—this or that government is “legitimate” because some community of people has endorsed it as their representative.
But that’s not at all what Weber meant. Weber used the term “legitimacy” to convey the idea of conformity rather than justification.
In his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly explained it like this:
“Legitimacy is the probability that other authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given authority.”
If I were to stop you on the street, brandish a gun, and tell you that I was taking you to a cage, I would probably be understood as a “kidnapper.”
If a police officer were to do the same thing, the police officer’s actions would be “legitimate.” Other police officers would likely assist rather than interfere. A judge would probably agree and endorse the action. If the police were to bring you to a prison, the prison officials would likely cage rather than free you. Civil authorities would ensure the police officer receives a paycheck. The news media would probably ignore or even praise the police officer’s actions.
That’s what Weber means by “legitimacy”: the measure that all the various actors that make up the state will support rather than oppose each other.
@HeavenlyPossum If you read Hybel's “On legitimacy, legitimation, and organizations” (1995) carefully, you'll notice that the second part of his “theoretical model” of legitimacy, although probably novel and constructivist, isn't so much about transferring legitimacy but rather about abusing the public's trust.
