U.S. Gun Culture as a Martial Culture Within a Weberian Framework: Disrupting the State’s Monopoly on Force

Abstract

This article proposes a new analytical framework to understand U.S. gun culture and its attendant cultural identifiers. It uses the Weberian concept of the state, in which the state’s monopoly on force is the basis of its legitimacy. Using this theory of the state, my key theoretical contribution is that gun culture is a contestation of the state’s monopoly on force. Relatedly, I argue that the system of cultural identifiers attached to gun culture competes with state power. In this way, gun culture asserts a devolved, local and patrimonial system of social power. I use this synthetic context of U.S. gun culture to understand theoretical issues of citizen–state relations and the role of identification in envisaging local power while offering narcissistic compensations to disenfranchised people. This descriptive theory argues that the state monopoly on force constitutes a central clause of the social contract between state and citizen, and the breach of this monopoly within gun culture challenges the contract itself. Identity and its conceptual markers, then, have a political end as a surrogate for social authority and personal-local power. This political function is hinted at but not adequately theorized in gun culture literature, certainly not using a Weberian, ‘monopoly on force’ framework. I propose that gun culture signals an antagonism within the social contract, in which citizens cede use of force to the state. This antagonism is activated in this case but theoretically latent in citizen–state relations. This article builds on the Hobbesian–Weberian premise to propose a model of Martial Culture Theory (MCT) to describe U.S. gun culture and those political movements that seek to reduce through force the state monopoly on power by diminishing its legitimacy and claiming theirs as a legitimate exercise of force.Through this process occurs a renegotiation of socio-political power distribution with the state. I submit this insight has valuable implications for state theory and citizen–state relations. In addition, it offers the most complete theory of how small government conservatism aligns with identity politics in U.S. gun culture, and how the prevailing mode of identitarian politics can manifest and be harnessed toward contestations of state power in Hobbesian-Weberian thought.