I wrote here recently about Richard Tuck's book on Hobbes. I mentioned that Tuck is also the author of a PHILOSOPHY AND GOVERNMENT: 1572 - 1651, a broad work on the development of European political thought in those fascinating decades, and I suggested that I would have something more to say about how Tuck's broad approach feeds into his study of Hobbes. This is that more. Tuck is fascinated by the cross-channel connection between the Brits and the Dutch. The Brits were happy to support lowland rebels against the Spanish empire, when THAT was the central opposition in their world. But once the Dutch became an empire themselves, the Brits' attitude turned hostile. Hobbes, especially on Tuck's reading, owed a lot to the Lowlanders in the development of his own thought Consider Justus Lipsius, a Flemish classicist, (1547 - 1606) on the one hand and Hugo Grotius (1583 -1645) the escapee from a Dutch prison who defined the modern notion of a "just war," on the o...
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Max Weber famously defined the State as the institution of a human community "that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a given territory." That definition had been very useful to anarchists, including anarcho-caps, as it has given us a nice definition of what we are saying we are against when we say we are against the State. The definition raises certain immediate questions. For Americans, accustomed to arguments over the "state" (in the historically specific sense) and the federal government, the question naturally arises whether a state can agree to share its 'monopoly.' Should we define terms so that both Virginia and the USA have some say in deciding what is a legitimate use of violence in downtown Richmond? Is that a duopoly in one sense but still a monopoly in another? Then there is the word "legitimate." The context indicates that Weber sees that state as self-defining in this ...