Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 34

GRIPLA34
extensive discussion of this subject has shown, Weber’s unfinished work
uses two concepts of the state, and the relationship between them was
never clarified. The rational-bureaucratic model of the state, which Weber
had in mind when he argued that the state had only existed in the Occident,
is still used by historians who claim that Europe – more precisely late
medieval and early modern europe – invented the state and spread it to the
rest of the world. It is even less applicable to medieval Iceland than to the
Greek polis. the much more general definition of the state in terms of a
monopoly of legitimate violence within a certain territory can be extended
to a much broader spectrum of societies, modern and premodern. But it
does not solve our problem: there was, notoriously, no monopoly of vio­
lence. At this point, however, we can turn to Weber’s complementary
concept of political community. It is defined as a community whose collec­
tive action consists in imposing an orderly domination by the participants
on a territorial domain (which can be more or less clearly demarcated), by
means of a readiness for physical violence.
We can take this sketch one step further. If order and violence revolve
around a centre endowed with eminent authority (and it has been plausibly
argued that human societies cannot do without some kind of such a cen­
tre), that centre can be more or less separate from the community, and
approximate more or less closely to the criteria already noted as defining
features of statehood in the more general sense. It can, in particular, move
towards a monopoly of violence; but violence can also be regulated rather
than monopolized (even through the incorporation of institutions as cen­
trifugal as the feud). To put it another way, the political centre is an inter­
mediate category between the political community and the state. Explicit
construction of a centre comes closer to state formation than the ongoing
functioning of a centre embedded in ancestral custom. on the other hand,
the explicit project can aim at minimizing the distance between the centre
and the political community, and in the process, functions previously or
elsewhere identified with state structures may be shifted to other institu­
tions – invented, inherited, or readjusted.
the Icelandic freestate is best understood in terms of such a self­limit­
ing process of state formation. So are the Greek polis and the Roman
republic, albeit in very different ways. Such processes are reflexive in a
double sense: they involve an explicit project of institution building (the