Pieter Spierenburg (2006) has advanced the provocative thesis that, in the history of state-formation processes in America, ‘democracy came too early'. In most parts of Western Europe, there took place over many centuries gradual processes of centralisation, eventuating in the concentration of the means of violence in fewer and fewer hands, and ultimately in the establishment of a relatively effective monopoly apparatus in the hands of kings. Gradual it may have been, but the struggles among a warrior elite were bloody, as more and more players were deprived of their capacity to wage war independently of the central ruler. The process was in its ?nal stages when European colonisation of North America began. Once stable and effective royal monopolies of violence had been established, as they were in general by the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the people's aim in subsequent struggles - most spectacularly in the French Revolution - was not to challenge or destroy the monopoly as such, but rather to ‘co-possess' the monopoly. In other words, the aim was to assert a more broadly based control over those who exercised the monopoly, to democratise it.
In North America, however, 'there was no phase of centralisation before democratisation set in', and 'democracy came to America too early'. By that he means something quite factual:
'the inhabitants had lacked the time to become accustomed to being disarmed. As a consequence, the idea remained alive that the very existence of a monopoly of force was undesirable. And it remained alive in an increasingly democratic form: not [as in medieval Europe] of regional elites carving out their private principality, but of common people claiming the right of self-defence. (...) Local elites and, increasingly, common people equated democracy with the right of armed protection of their own property and interests' (Spierenburg 2006: 109-10).
Spierenburg acknowledges that it would be an oversimpli?cation to suggest that the transition from struggles to destroy the monopoly apparatus to struggles to co-possess it did not take place at all in the usa, but 'the best one can say is that the majority of the population wanted it both ways': they 'accepted the reality of government institutions but at the same time they cherished an ethic of self-help'. 'Today', remarks Spierenburg, 'the idea that individuals cannot and should not rely on state institutions in order to protect their homes is alive and well. Members of the Michigan Militia explicitly say so in [Michael Moore's 2003 documentary ?lm] Bowling for Columbine' (2006: 110).