Many, including me, have relied on Max Weber’s definition of a state as “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate violence”. I thought that violence was synonymous with power and that the best we could hope for was a legitimate exercise of violence, one that was proportionate and used only as a last resort.

I have a blog post about state monopolies on violence because of Hannah Arendt. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was my re-introduction to moral philosophy. It, more than any other book, has informed this blog. To Arendt, thinking and judging are paramount. It is not so much, to her, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is instead that the unexamined life exists in a state of mortal peril, separated only by circumstances from becoming one...

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Remember Horseshoe Theory? It’s the observation that in many ways, the extremist wings of political movements resemble each other more than centrists or their more moderate brethren. We see this in anti-Semitism, for example. In any given week this year, you’re about as likely to see anti-Semitism come from Stormfront… or the British Labour Party.

I’ve been thinking about horseshoe theory in light of another issue: the police. Let me explain.

Like most denizens of the internet, I’ve been exposed to libertarians of various persuasions. One common complaint I’ve seen among these libertarians is a belief that the state has an illegitimate monopoly on violence. This is most frequently bundled with calls to abolish the police in specific and government in general. Now I see calls to abolish the police coming from the left.

I disagree strongly with calls to abolish the police. It’s not that...

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