ABSTRACT
The issue of how the specialists in legitimate organized violence ought to and do relate to the society they are supposed to protect and to those who rule it, is at least as old as political thought itself: one finds it raised in Book III of Plato’s Republic. It was long dealt with in terms which restricted it to one single question: how to se cure the full subordination of de facto military power to legitimate, sovereign political power? This strongly suggests that such a prob lem is not specific to liberal democracies alone: that it in fact de rives from the nature of things.1
