State expansion paradoxically reduces effective control and increases reliance on violence

Evidence

Relatedly, as states have increased their scope and range, their growth in institutional determination and (formal) authority over the lives of their inhabitants — both citizens and noncitizens, those in and out of the state alike - de facto control, efficiency, and effect have diminished (Comaroff calls this “the Minogue Paradox,” 1998:336). There is, one could say, a point of diminishing returns, a marginal effectivity of rule. The more repressive, the more likely resistant. And the more cemented, the more internally cracked. This is especially so regarding racial repression and rule. States, as Weber famously insisted, are those institutions effecting a monopoly over the legitimate means of physical force. Thus the greater state insistence on effecting and exercising such monopoly, the more visible. The greater the violence states promote in everyday life, the more they have to resort to threatened or explicit violence as the mode of rule. And the more violence becomes a norm, the readier those within and without the state are loosened, if not licensed, to resort to forms of personalized and anonymous violence. This is especially exacerbated by racial terms, for race, while making institutionally visible the perpetrators, picks out the objects of violence in emphatically identifiable ways. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1726

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘Minogue Paradox’ names the inverse relationship between state scope and de facto control.
• XREF: Connects to Weber on the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and to the theme of racial rule from other chapters in this volume. — connects to: Developed civilization cannot curb aggression because it depends on regimentation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2134; Expanded state administration destabilizes cultural traditions and raises legitimation demands — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2710; Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 179 (+6 more)