>>511411662>Governments enforce rules via their monopoly on legitimate violenceBut is that the only way for rules to be enforced? This is the point I disputed way up at the start of this conversation.
Because the modern government IS a system of organized coercive violence, it's easy to work under the assumption that it has to be, that this is the only possible way of arranging things. But that isn't so. Because if you follow the chain of command all the way up, what do you find?
>ConstitutionIn almost every country left in the world, it's not a man or lineage or household at the top of the pyramid, it's a document. Some statement of abstract principles which ties the whole thing together. That document cannot pick up a gun and start blasting when things don't go according to its dictates. At the end of the day, all structures of power are grounded in the same thing: belief in their legitimacy. It is belief which makes all of this possible. If abstract rules, and the belief in the legitimacy of those rules, can keep the entire structure of coercive violence in check, then how can you argue that enforcing rules requires a superior structure of violence?
How can you argue that there is no law without police/military, if they themselves are bound by the law, and not an endlessly regressing system of higher police/military? It's not turtles all the way up, anon. It stops somewhere. To lazily invoke popular culture to prove the point,
>power resides wherever men believe it residesIt's not the violence that perpetuates the social structure. It's the social structure that perpetuates the violence.