The distinction between force and constraint, state and
governmentWhen we define the state in terms of force, we naturally are curious about the
political mechanisms in societies without a state. But to understand how order is
maintained in societies without institutions claiming a monopoly of legitimate force,
we need to make two distinctions that are not usually made in political theory.
The first is the distinction between force, on the one hand, and constraint, on
the other, and the second (which we will come to later) is the distinction between
state and government. If stateless societies exert discipline without having an
apparatus that can impose force, how do we characterise this discipline? In our
view, it is necessary to distinguish between force and constraint. The two are
invariably lumped together, particularly by classical liberal writers who often use
the terms force and constraint synonymously. Yet the two are very different.
Force imposes physical harm, and it should be remembered that mental illnesses
like depression create physical pain so that causing depression counts as force.
Coercion we take to be a credible threat of force: a 2-year-old with a plastic gun
cannot be said to coerce because the force ‘threatened’ is not credible. Thus, in the
standard example of ‘your money or your life’ demand, what causes you to comply
is the knowledge that force will be used against you if you do not.
It is true that coercion can be defined in a much broader way. Here coercion is
seen not as the threat of force, but as moral and social pressures that compel a
person to do something that they otherwise would not have done. It is better,
however, to describe these pressures as ‘constraints’: constraints certainly cause you
to do something you would not have otherwise done, but these pressures do not
involve force or the credible threat of force. Constraint may involve pressures that
are unintentional and informal.
Take the following example. You become religious and your agnostic and atheist
friends no longer want to have coffee with you. You are cycling on a windy day
and find that you have to pedal considerably harder. Constraints can be natural or
social, and when moral judgements are made about a person’s behaviour, these
constraints are ‘concentrated’ in ways that are often unpleasant. The point about
these constraints, whatever form they take, is that they are impossible to avoid in
a society. They do not undermine our capacity for choice. On the contrary, they
are conditions that make choice both possible and necessary.
This distinction between force and constraint translates into the second distinction
we want to discuss: that between state and government. The latter two are not the
same, even though in state-centred societies it may be very difficult to disentangle
them. The term ‘governance’ is often used but the argument is better expressed if
we stick to the older term. Government, it could be argued, involves resolving
conflicts of interest through sanctions which may be unpleasant but do not involve
force. Families, schools, clubs and voluntary societies govern themselves with rules
that pressure people into compliance but they do not use force. States, on the other
hand, do use force. It is true that states do not always act as states. In other words,
they may in particular areas act ‘governmentally’, as we have defined it: in these
areas they can be said to constrain, rather than resort to force. Of course in real-
life institutions in state-centred societies, these two dimensions are invariably mixed
up. The National Health Service (NHS) in Britain is a good example of an institution22 Part 1 Classical ideas