> The government has a monopoly on violence.
No, it doesn't.
People who aren't the government, and who lack its sanction in doing so, apply violence every day.
No, it doesn't.
People who aren't the government, and who lack its sanction in doing so, apply violence every day.
I'm certainly not the government, and I can quite legitimately be violent when defending myself from illegitimate (aka non-governmental) violence.
For example, if someone breaks into my home and behaves threateningly, I can (rather violently) shoot them, and the government won't object in the slightest. So much for them having a monopoly.
Okay, I know that he specifically refers to the US (he mentioned Gitmo) but remember that even then the state is the one who lets you exercise violence. The monopoly's just lending some of its power to make you shut up and stop whining so he can keep minding his (evil) business.
Also: Windows had a monopoly even when Linux existed. Monopolies don't always have 100% of the market share, but they're still a monopoly de facto and will fight hard to achieve the full monopoly.
What's the deal with the prostitute? Breach of services (especially illegal services) doesn't justify violence. Did the prostitute grab the john's money and then try and run off? If that's what happened, I'm not too surprised by the result, since we're allowed to defend ourselves against theft.
Now, perhaps the government has a monopoly on legitimate use of force (indeed, Max Weber used that as the criteria to define whether an entity was the government of a particular territory).
In the sense Weber uses it, it may be fuzzy, but its not subjective (its essentially the aggregate of how it is treated by the people in the territory.)
> The legitimacy of an act (violence in this case) is highly subjective.
The idea that legality is objective in a way legitimacy is not is debatable.
> I think I would rather say that the government has a legal monopoly on violence.
Perhaps, but that seems to be a trivial tautology, in that what is legal is precisely, by definition, what is formally allowed by some government.
> The legitimacy argument breaks down for oppressive governments where some revolting citizens take up violence because they see it as their last and only option.
Weber would state that, to the extent that this is a general failure over some subset of its territory, the entity has failed as the government of that territory -- that, in the case where no entity exercise a legal monopoly on violence over a territory, there is no government, and in the case where there is such an entity but its not the one that is claiming to be the government, then the claiming entity is simply wrong.
> Some might argue that their act is legitimate, but it is still illegal.
In the eyes of the purported government that they are revolting against, but not in the eyes of the purported government that they have formed in the revolution. Legality has no meaning without reference to a governing authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_...
There is a lot more nuance there than the party-line recitation suggests.