The Weberian criterion of sovereignty and military training

Max Weber defines political sovereignty as the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory. But there is a problem: how to unleash yet control the killing potential of the forces of order, the army and the police? The problem is especially acute in the crucial point of counter-revolution: will the army fire on “the people”? Plato saw this problem clearly in his analysis of the character of the guardians, who had to be kind to friends yet fierce to enemies (Republic, 375c).

Interestingly enough, the problem is more on the “unleashing” side than on the “controlling” side, for killing is less easy than it might seem for those raised with a Hobbesian outlook in which the ability to kill is assumed to be widespread. We should recall here the way Hobbes emphasizes the role of fear in the state of nature in prompting the agreement to form the civil state—and fear of a return to the state of nature once in such a state. The reason we must be afraid in – and of – the the state of nature is the widespread ability of people to kill each other; while asleep, even the strongest can be killed by the weakest.

Researchers expecting to find that ability displayed in combat, where the logic of “kill or be killed” would predict high rates of deadly interaction, were shocked and dismayed to find that traditional military drill (target shooting at bull’s-eyes) produced only a 15-20% firing rate among American infantry troops in WWII, excluding machine-gunners (Grossman, 1996, pp. 3–4, citing Marshall, 1978; see also Collins, 2008).

While close-range killing can be done by a very small percentage of soldiers in “cold blood” (i.e., with full conscious awareness), Grossman (1996) argues for a deep-seated inhibition against one-on-one, face-to-face, cold-blooded killing on the part of some 98% of soldiers, a figure which correlates well with the estimated 2% of the population who count as low-affect or “stimulus-hungry” sociopaths (Niehoff, 1999; Pierson, 1999). The problem with close-range killing is the emotional barrier of fear (Grossman, 1996; Collins, 2008).

So far from facing the Hobbesian problem of having to restrain a widespread ability to kill by creating a fearful State, the contemporary American state in fact faces a problem in training its forces to overcome fear so that they are able to kill.

References

Collins, R. (2008). Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Grossman, D. (1996). On Killing. Boston: Back Bay Books.

Niehoff, D. (1999). The Biology of Violence. New York: Free Press.

Pierson, D. (1999). Natural Killers—Turning the Tide of Battle. Military Review, (May – June), 60–65.

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This is from a piece entitled "Political Emotion" that I'm writing for an OUP volume entitles Collective Emotions, edited by Christian von Scheve and Mikko Salmela.