Sociologist and legal theorist Max Weber argued that states claimed a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The monopoly is most successful, of course, when the overt use of state violence is minimised, acting as a sword of Damocles affecting the behaviour of everyone over which it hangs. Robert Cover sought to bring into view the violence implicit in the routine deployment of law – not merely in the use of police forces to arrest people for what all concede to be arguable violations of existing and uncontroversial law, but in the normative claims that ordinary and constitutional law make, which induce people to believe that whatever contrary views they might hold are somehow illegitimate.

Constitutions often originate in violence, as revolutionaries displace by force regimes they regard as oppressive. Even relatively peaceful revolutions can occur against a background of violence, as dissidents withdraw their assent to the legitimacy of the state's monopoly of violence, and thereby enable the possibility that some other entities might now claim – and use – violence as a legitimate weapon available to them no less than to the state. Overt violence can sustain constitutions as well, suppressing secession and its predecessor, mere dissent. More interesting, perhaps, are the matters Cover addressed, where violence lies behind state actions, but never appears openly, even as normative communities other than the state find themselves squeezed out of existence.