Violence and Coercion
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical. Blaise Pascal, Pensées
In the chapter on power, a distinction stood at the end that here becomes the starting point: power arises in common action, violence appears where power falls apart. But the German word Gewalt carries a double meaning that no other term bears in this way. It means the raw fist as well as ordered state authority, destruction as well as regulated governance. An emancipatory, critical view must endure this ambiguity and interrogate it: When is Gewalt legitimate order, and when merely coercion in the guise of law?
Gewalt and walten
The word betrays its origin. Gewalt comes from walten, that is, to rule, to dispose, to have something in hand. Originally it denoted the authority to command, not the blow. This root still resounds today: in "parental authority" (elterliche Gewalt), in "state authority" (Staatsgewalt), in the "separation of powers" (Gewaltenteilung). In none of these expressions does a blow necessarily lie, but rather an ordered power of disposal.
Precisely here lies a linguistic trap that critical thinking should lay bare. Because the same word names both, governing and striking, the one can hide behind the other. Whoever says "Gewalt" can mean legitimate authority or naked brutality. Domination profits from this vagueness, for it lets raw enforcement appear as the mere exercise of order.
Violence and coercion
To be distinguished from this is coercion. Violence is the open, mostly bodily action that breaks a will. Coercion is more comprehensive and often quieter: it leaves a formal choice but narrows it so that basically none remains. Whoever "voluntarily" signs under threat is coerced without being struck. Most relations of super- and subordination rest not on daily violence but on a coercion that keeps violence only as a possibility in the background.
Rape is the point at which both coincide in their cruelest form: violence against the body and the complete disregard of the other's will. It is the opposite of all recognition, because it makes the other into a mere means. That the same word-root lies in the harmless "walten" (to govern) should not reassure but make us vigilant: every disposal over others carries within it the possibility of its perversion.
State authority and separation of powers
Modern societies have not abolished violence but concentrated it. Max Weber defined the state as that instance which claims for itself the monopoly of legitimate physical force.1 The sense is emancipatory: where not everyone exercises fist-law against everyone, but a regulated instance keeps watch, the weak are better protected than in the state of nature. The individual's renunciation of violence is the price of security.
But this monopoly is dangerous as soon as it owes no one any accountability. Walter Benjamin has shown how closely law and violence are interwoven: there is a violence that founds law and one that preserves it.2 So that the state does not itself become a perpetrator of violence, the liberal tradition answers with the separation of powers: state power is divided into legislation (legislativa, legislature), administration (executiva, executive) and adjudication (iudicativa, judiciary), so that none becomes autonomous. State authority remains legitimate only as long as it must justify itself before the dominated and is bound by law. Otherwise ordered governance tips back into mere coercion. (Look at any authoritarian states you like, from Nazi Germany to Putin's Russia.)
Natural forces and natural constraints
Finally, we also know Gewalt where no one acts: in the forces of nature (Naturgewalten), in the storm, in the quake, in the flood. Here the will is lacking against which indignation could be directed; one can reproach nature with nothing. This is more than a coincidence of words. It reminds us that humans have always also stood under natural constraints, under hunger, illness, finitude, which no court can lift.
But the critical view does not end in Stoic humility. Much that long counted as a force of nature turns out to be made: a flood is fate, its devastating effect on the poorest is politics. The trick of domination often consists in passing off social coercion as natural constraint, in order to withdraw it from change. Emancipatory is therefore the question that runs through the whole chapter: which violence must we accept because it really is nature, and which do we only call so because it is more convenient not to change it.