Ballots do not justify bullies

Every state today claims a monopoly on determining and exerting the legitimate use of force against its citizens and anyone else who chooses to enter its territory. It also claims a monopoly in deciding whether to exert such force against any outside agencies it judges to threaten its citizens or territory, or to leave the task to other potential enforcers or even abandon it altogether.

Democratic states do not merely claim monopolies over their citizens and anyone who imperils them; they also claim their title from the citizens themselves, on the grounds that the latter have conferred the monopoly in the first place. The core rationale of the state is to diminish the scale, unpredictability and capriciousness with which force is exerted within its territory and enhance the lives of every citizen by doing so.

The strongest vindication of the special standing ascribed to modern democracies would be to succeed in delivering that diminution more extensively and dependably than any previous political form.

Like every earlier form of state, the modern democratic state is an ideological and a practical construction, and there are evident elements of strain in both dimensions in its claim to confine violence to a bare and edifying minimum. Daniel Ross's Violent Democracy is a spirited assault on its pretensions in both dimensions, focusing on President George W. Bush's War on Terror and a number of recent controversies in Australia. While far from sympathetic to Bush's political vision, and outspoken on a range of Australian political issues, Ross does not appear to have any definite conclusions on the relation between violence and political authority, or even the impact of modern state forms on its incidence among modern populations.

Indeed, he does not appear especially interested in developing particular lines of thought to a definite conclusion, or even undermining the conclusions of anyone else. He seeks more to provoke his readers into a less comforting perspective on the political circumstances of their lives, and perhaps also to impress them with his own relative sophistication. The result is quite irritating if you happen to be interested in the cogency or otherwise of any of the lines of thought in question or the practical political judgments on which they bear. Most irritation stems from the apparent inconsequentiality of what he judges worth saying; but some, less subjectively, arises from the pressing importance of the topics on which he has chosen to write.

He is right to insist on the huge gap in substance and plausibility between the historical foundation and causal character of modern state authority and the form and content of the practices that now impute it to the peoples over whom it is exercised. He has excellent grounds for insisting that no state, however democratic its pretensions or even purposes, can in principle define democratically either the scope of its territory or the makeup of its own citizen body, both of which it presupposes in the authority it claims to exert. Whenever its authority is challenged from within, the most self-righteously democratic state can vindicate the territorial or demographic scope of that authority only by conquering those who choose to challenge it. In many cases, it was unmistakably conquest or dynastic accident that defined most of that scope in the first place.

Australia today, even without the hermeneutic assistance of Bush, forms a compelling instance of the parlous relation between conquest and democracy, with Tasmania as the limit case with its own version of a "final solution".

Ross - Jwho won his Monash University PhD with a thesis on "Heidegger and the Question of the Political" and has tried his hand with some success at film - is at his most alert and amusing on Australian materials. The more disquieting elements in his text have the flavour less of Heidegger's own notably unreassuring relation to the political than of an overzealous effort to translate the master's accents without residue into spoken Australian.

The result is in little danger of corrupting the youth; but it is hard to see how it could contribute to anyone's political education. If, as the cover states, Ross is one of Australia's rising intellectuals, this must be better news for him than for future beneficiaries of an Australian higher education.

John Dunn is professor of political theory, Cambridge University.