Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker (Key Sociologists) by Turner Stephen P. & Factor Regis A

Author:Turner, Stephen P. & Factor, Regis A. [Turner, Stephen P.]
Format: mobi
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2003-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

its claims upon its members by means of mechanical coercion is dependent upon the cooperation of the State, and the State has it in its power to fix the conditions under which it will grant such aid.

([1877] 1913:238)

Weber's definition is a variation on this: "A compulsory political organization with continuous operations [politischer Anstaltsbetrieb] will be called a 'state' insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of force" ([1922] 1978:54).

The main difference between the two definitions resides in the substitution of the term "legitimate" for "social." We shall see that this is a significant difference. But the negative significance of each definition is similar: the state is not defined by the possession of some ideal or mythical property, such as sovereignty, which is simultaneously normative and factual. Thus there is no normative "fact" about the state to explain. There is only the natural fact of the actual possession of a monopoly. In Ihering's definition, it is a monopoly on socially coercive force. In Weber's definition, it is the natural fact of the successful defense of a claim to a monopoly on "legitimate" force. "Legitimacy" is conceived by Weber as a non-dogmatic fact—a fact about the beliefs of the governed. From a normative or "dogmatic" point of view, the claim of legitimacy may be "invalid," but this does not affect its place in Weber's scheme.

Weber's categories of associations and his categorical distinction between legitimate orders and other regularities are another instance of explanatory displacement. The traditional problem addressed by theories of the state, to justify and explain the normative fact of sovereignty, is replaced, in Ihering, by a non-dogmatic explanatory problem, the explanation of the rise of a particular kind of de facto monopoly of force. Weber, who was perhaps sensitized by the critics of Ihering to the difficulties in this strategy, includes in his definition the "dogmatic" fact of claims to legitimacy. Appealing to the historical fact of claims to legitimacy, however, creates a new explanatory problem for Weber. Many questions of a causal kind about legal orders, notably problems of the transition from a pre-legal to a legal order, cannot be answered without explaining the origins of novel ideas of legitimacy. So the conundrum posed by Stammler about the origin of the idea of legal rightness continues to haunt Weber.

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