Legitimate Force and Violent Enmities: Vendetta Violence and State Formation in Early Modern Italy

Control over violence has been an integral part of theories of state formation since before Hobbes. Particularly influential for modern scholarship has been Max Weber’s theory of state formation, which identified monopolization of violence as a hallmark of the modern state. Weber’s protege, Norbert Elias, extended Weber’s argument by attributing the decline of violence to internal policing in the form of a civilizing process. For Elias, men became more civilized and less violent as they began to adopt a type of courtly habitus (i.e., manners and refined behaviors) at the seventeenth-century courts of absolutist kings. More recently, Elias’s model has been adopted by Pieter Spierenberg and Steven Pinker to explain a long-term decline in violence over the early modern period. This paper challenges that model by examining vendettas in the Republic of Venice, Bologna, and Modena, each different forms of states for concepts of legitimate vs. illegitimate violence. In these three political centers, the same civic elites who formed the bedrock of the emerging bureaucratic state, also practiced vendetta as a way of asserting their right to redress and enforce justice. As this paper will discuss, wrangling over vendetta helped to constitute the lawmaking process as a dialectic between sovereign and subject whereby norms, and the violation of norms, official legalities, and illegalities of right were ultimately established by first being negotiated.