Responsibility of the Modern State to Punish

In a village dispute of the past, the wronged family might have taken revenge itself. A modern citizen instead calls the police and expects the State, not herself, to respond. That shift — from private vengeance to State monopoly over punishment — is not an accident of history but a responsibility the modern State has deliberately taken on, and this topic explains why.

In two minutes

The modern State claims, and is generally expected to exercise, a monopoly on legitimate punishment, replacing private revenge with a public, impartial process, precisely because unregulated private retaliation is unpredictable, disproportionate and destabilising for society as a whole.

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