Coercion

Coercion is the use or threatened use of physical or psychological force (especially punishment) to get one's way and to affect the behavior and/or emotions of others. In everyday language, coercion is “naked power.” The targets of coercive power “respect it solely because it is power, and not for any other reason” (Russell, 1938, 66). Coercion is most vividly expressed by a statement in Thucydides's “Melian Dialogue” (in A History of the Peloponnesian Wars) that “the strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept.”

At the political and social level, coercive power typically occurs in two social-political situations, often closely related: (1) Military conquest and the resulting social transformations; for example, the careers of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, the capture and enslavement of Africans in the New World, the world [Page 209]empires of the European countries, and the U.S. treatment of Native Americans in the nineteenth century; and (2) the decay or collapse of traditional, organized, and restrained forms of power, as in the case of the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, or the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in the early 1970s, and Iraq immediately after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Under such conditions, illegal or extralegal entities employing coercive tactics (gangsters, extortionists, paramilitary forces, and those who plot military coups) often become prominent. The political philosophies of fascism, authoritarianism, and communism are often characterized by their use of coercion and even their attraction to it. At the opposite ideological pole, anarchism and libertarianism by definition disavow any necessity for coercion in theory and oppose it in practice.

Many forms of coercion also occur at lower levels of society. For example, people thought to be “deviant” are coerced through incarceration and enforced psychiatric commitment. Religious “heretics” are persecuted, and “different” minorities are subject to prejudice and “ethnic cleansing.” In small face-to-face groups, coercion takes the forms of bullying, rape, sexual coercion and sexual harassment, domestic violence, and child abuse. Many milder (even socially acceptable) forms of coercion take place in everyday settings such as families (especially with respect to childrearing), schools and other institutions, and workplaces. Other forms of power, such as economic power, can easily become coercive when they involve asymmetrical or one-sided distribution of resources. (Karl Marx pointed out the fundamental asymmetry of capitalist production: The owners have the factories and the machines, while the workers have only their work to “sell.”)

Perhaps it is even possible to speak of a “coercion of the weak”—for example a crying baby, a beggar, or even a leader such as Mahatma Gandhi. In these cases, however, there is usually an explicit or implicit appeal to the conscience, sense of responsibility or morality, or simply prudence of the stronger party.