Strange coincidences abound. Yesterday I decided to plunge headlong into Mark Danner's long but essential article from the New York Review of Books in which he looks through the rear-view mirror to establish exactly how the United States could have convinced itself to invade Iraq, given how obvious the resulting diabolical mess now seems. Therein I found this sentence:
"If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq."
Securing a monopoly on legitimate violence. At first glance it seems to be describing the establishment of a police state, but it is in fact setting out a precondition for individual liberty, as long as it's the good guys who hold the monopoly (although words like "legitimate" can readily slide through one's fingers).
Anyway. There I was this afternoon, making good headway with Ian McEwan's "Saturday", when, on page 88, I read this:
"Holding the unruly, the thugs, in check is the famous 'common power' to keep all men in awe - a governing body, an arm of the state, freely granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence."
Okay, the phrase might well, for all I know, be covered in Lesson One of Political Science 101, but to stumble across it twice in 24 hours, well, you have to admit that's a tiny bit creepy.
(Yes, I have finally started "Saturday", after having suffered from reader's block for the best part of 12 months. I don't know what was stopping me from picking it up, but it has sat beside the bed, and sat, and sat, and in the meantime I haven't read any other novels because I wanted to read "Saturday" and didn't want anything else to get in the way. Oh, I torture myself sometimes. Well, after a gorgeously languid, yet meticulous, start, it suddenly opens out, around page 87, into a typically brilliant, stomach-tightening Ian McEwan set-up.)
