Erasmo Castellani
The Violence of Sovereignty. Review essay of:

Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter Evans,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 99-1992 second edition
(Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992)

Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems
Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)

Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology
(Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998)
The monopoly of violence is seen as one of the fundamental characteristics of the modern state,
intrinsically connected to the concept of sovereignty. There is however, a lively debate around the
causes, the origins, and the dynamics which connected state sovereignty to the exercise of violence.
Charles Tilly in his 1985 essay War Making and State Making as Organized Crime considers
how the process of state making was intrinsically intertwined with that of making war and the
extraction of resources: resources are necessary to wage war, which is necessary to overcome other
competitors and enlarge territory. Larger territories offer more resources, which need to be
protected both internally and from external threats. Tilly here stresses the importance of
monopolizing the “internal violence,” a crucial factor in the process of centralization the state and
necessary in order to collect taxes more efficiently. This happened by imposing direct control over
territories, abating and delegitimizing the authority previously exercised by local lords. Two
strategies were adopted by early state-makers to acquire direct rule over the whole territory: either
locally extending their officialdom, or subordinating police forces—previously managed by local
patrons—to the central government. For Tilly, central powers succeeded in establishing and
legitimizing their own violence, and finally monopolized it—and the right to collect tributes—by
selling protection to the people. The process of the legitimization of the exercise of violence and the
transformation of what would have otherwise been an “extortion” into a “tribute” was thus a long
process which necessitated the suppression of any internal challenge to the authority. In order to
achieve such a transformation, states incorporated potential competitors who accepted the central
rule in order to maintain a privileged position, and outlawed those who refused to be subjugated,
“making” them brigands and pirates. Tilly thus dismisses the military revolution—the improvement
of artillery—and merely economic developments—the expansion of commerce and the production
of capital—as key factors in the birth of the modern state.
Five years after the publishing of War Making and State Making, Charles Tilly re-elaborated the
processes of state-building from a slightly different perspective.1 In Coercion, Capital and
European States his focus shifts towards an investigation of the expansion of the state apparatus,
with the goal of explaining the final success of national states over other institutional arrangements.
His military driven theory—war is described as the “ultimately determining” state activity—sets the
framework for analyzing the shift from indirect to direct rule, which is obtained through a bargain
between the rulers and the rural lords, and established with the institution of standing armies. This
bargaining with the peripheral powers – the foundation of national states – required the periphery
to consent to taxation, which, as shown in his earlier essay, allowed the ruler to legitimize his
coercive violence in the extraction of resources and collecting taxes, and by incorporating rural
upper classes into the central government, as England and France did. In other words, the
1
He will revise his work for a second edition, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
acquisition of the monopoly on violence entailed a monopoly on collecting revenues and (absolute)
sovereignty.
In early modern Europe, the state formed during a period of pervasive warfare, in which rulers
extracted resources and coerced people in diverse ways based on the ecological features of their
environments. In other words, rulers directed their efforts to acquire means of war in territorially
determined setting in which they ruled (defined by Tilly as either “capital intensive,” where
capitalists groups monetized in the production and the exchange of high valued goods in urban
markets, or “coercive intensive” ones, in which capitalless landlords extracted and controlled land
and raw materials through coercion). Thus, for Tilly, the national state was a byproduct of the
efforts made to organize the regional economy. It was successful because, blending capital and
coercive resources, territorial states overcame developmental limits of the other two systems.
National states, centralizing the power and suppressing domestic opposition, could in fact mobilize
unified subjects with a shared identity, reinforcing the state apparatus both internally and in relation
to external threats. On the contrary, previous successful models of rule, the so called “capital
intensive” (city-)states and the “coercive intensive” empires became obsolete and incapable to
compete with territorial states because they were, respectively, either military weak after the
establishment of standing armies, or unable to mobilize and control their subjects.
For Michael Mann in the essays that comprise States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political
Sociology, the formation of the sovereign state was driven by processes of centralization and
territorialization, inscribed in a warfare framework. Such a generalization (that the state was
concerned only with making war and preparing for war) is based on the empirical analysis of the
medieval and early modern financial accounts of England. In these records, the first time in which
domestic and civil expenditure exceeded military expenditure was 1881; for Mann this clearly shows
the limits of theoretical perspectives which approach the study of the state by focusing on its
domestic and economic functions. Hence, the revolutionary impact of capitalism and
industrialization on warfare did not change the rationale of the state, which was and remained until
very recently to prepare for and to make war.
In his work of historical sociology, Mann considers violence in a broader, socio-economic sense. In
fact, while Tilly conceives of the violence of imposing taxation as an ancillary practice to war making
(in other words, collecting resources was necessary for the military aggrandizement and
consolidation of the state), for Mann taxation appears to be a form of violence in and of itself. Even
though he does not neglect that collecting revenues was primarily aimed for military purposes, Mann
highlights the fact that taxation created social inequality. This allows him to abandon the classic
Marxist understanding of class struggle as a development of consciousness of inherent conflictual
dynamics between societal groups. Rather, he sees it as generated by geopolitics: different groups of
capitalists, at different times, influenced the trajectories of states, and, at the same time, determined
the political exclusion of the working class.
Mann does not theoretically determine the different trajectories and the different times of the statebuilding process. On the contrary, he pushes further an “anti-theoretical” argument regarding the
formation of the modern states that stresses the historical contingency of it. He agrees however, at
least to a certain extent, with some long-term developmental patterns in the process of state-building
(roughly between the XIII and the XIX centuries in Europe) as conceived by Tilly. Both consider
the rise of the modern—territorial, centralist—state to be determined by the warfare framework and
both recognize that war was the main activity of the state, and that its economic structures were
determined by the (international) military order. They also agree that the formation of modern states
followed different—and largely contingent—trajectories, although Mann, unlike Tilly, sees them as
being more politically than ecologically determined. Either way, both encounter difficulties in
conceptualizing the process of state formation. Technological and economic “revolutions”
(improvement of artillery and transportation, development of capitalism) may have played an
important part in the process, but always in order to better serve the territorial and military interests.
Geopolitical concerns were crucial for the state, both internally (centralization of the territory) and
externally (aggrandizement and defense of the borders from other competitors). Mann gives more
relevance to this aspect, hinting at the fact that the internal/external dichotomy emerged only when
the modern, territorial state was already established.
Perhaps the most contentious point is their different understanding of the reasons for making war
and preparation for war. Tilly clearly states that power holders did not seek the monopoly on
violence “with the intention of creating national states…Nor did they ordinarily foresee that national
states would emerge from war making, extraction, and capital accumulation. Instead, [the European
rulers] warred in order to check or overcome their competitors and thus to enjoy the advantages of
power within a secure or expanding territory” (172). In other words, external competition was what
made of the state machine a war machine in motion, but the effort was guided by domestic
concerns. In Mann the real aim of war making is less clear, unless we convince ourselves of the
immanent nature of warfare.
The different economic arrangements and the social bargain between power holders and their
subordinates typical of the previous European feudal system are also key components in Hendrik
Spruyt’s analysis of the establishment of the territorial, centralist state at the expenses of the other
systems of rule. The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change
presents three examples of early modern economic growth. Although resonating with Tilly’s models,
Spruyt’s appear to be more historically and economically, rather than ecologically, determined. The
territorial state, characterized by a defined territory, internal hierarchy, and external authority—
qualities that he recognizes, in nuce, already in post-Capetian France—succeeded because it was more
efficient in establishing standardized systems of rule than city-states (in Italy, for example) or urban
leagues (the Hanseatic League), and its institutional structure was better suited to increasing revenue
and military capacity. Moreover, Spruyt, a scholar of international relationships, highlights that
although sovereign states emerged from domestic haggling, their systemic success was thanks to
international processes of mimicry and mutual empowerment. Thus, what matters for Spruyt is the
impact of the economic transformations of the late middle ages in different socio-political
arrangements. To put it simply, the sovereign state emerged because of its institutional soundness:
the development of political hierarchies within well-defined territories allowed it to maximize and
better move military resources, useful to create a “safer” environment for the growth of trade.
Together with Tilly and Mann, Spruyt challenges the periodization of the modern state, and
proposes, once again, understanding the process as a long evolution. Yet Spruyt’s position clearly
contrasts Mann’s, who explicitly abated the importance of economy—international trade—and sees
war as the transformative agent. Instead, Spruyt supports his idea by showing that city-states did not
fall because of military weakness, but because their sovereignty was inevitably contested by their
subjects, as they lacked a well-established hierarchical system. Moreover, The Sovereign State and its
Competitors, with his argument about the relevance of sovereign state mutual empowerment,
questions the diachronic understanding of state formation: the sovereign state did not emerge
because it was the best fit for the new European scenario, as Tilly seems to argue for. Spruyt instead
insists that the new socio-economic conditions originated from different political arrangements
which determined the decline of feudalism. The Darwinian, if you will, selection happened after the
institution these different political units were formed. Thus, urban leagues ceased to exist because,
lacking territorial unity, they were not seen as reliable by the other sovereign states.
What about violence then? In Spruyt military success appears to be a consequence, rather than a
condition for the international establishment of the modern state. Violence, however, is not absent
in his work, it is just slightly hidden; it can be only inferred, as it is not directly addressed in the text.
Since internal hierarchy is crucial for the establishment of the sovereign state, it was necessary to
eradicate domestic dissent. Once the hierarchical system was established, the centralist state, which
could better mobilize resources for the army, protected the state from external threats. Spruyt does
not necessarily neglect the existence of violent actors and dynamics as Tilly and Mann do, but,
perhaps on account of the different focus of his work, he does not find it necessary to explain the
violent implications of the processes of centralization. What is clear is that in Spruyt’s analysis
violence is not an agent of change, but rather plays an ancillary role that only emerged more
significantly in its military connotation—but as a consequence, at that point—after the territorial
states were already formed and internally hierarchized.
Violence thus, whether as a cause or consequence, played a central role in—if it was not entangled
with— the process of state making. But violence and its exercise became an active element in the
process only when it was politicized, that is to say when it was legitimized within the state, and
recognized outside its borders. The “politicization” of violence worked as well for characterizing the
enemies of the state, as suggested by Tilly in the “creation of pirates and brigands: in his words, “the
distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" force makes no difference to the fact.” Perhaps
for the shared focus on institutional actors, the authors considered here seem to agree on reading
top-down trajectories in the intertwined relationship between violence and sovereignty.