The second defect highlighted by almost all his critics is that he ignores the power relationships in societies. Although his ideas about the con¬struction of solidarity in modern industrial society are predicated on the absence of shared experience and therefore of any naturally arising common values, he sees law as a solution to this problem with its potential for social conflict, instead of seeing law itself as a site of conflict. Laws as often express the interests of the Victors in power struggles as they express any consensus or compromise - much more often, according to the theorists in Chapter 7. Moreover, conflicts, for Durkheim, are between individuals, and differences in interest are between the individual and the social: Durkheim appears to lack any perception of individuals as mem¬bers of groups which may have opposed interests (Garland 1983; 1990a). This neglect of power and of the conflict between interest groups means that his view of the state is altogether too benign; he also omits any refer¬ence to the state as enjoying a monopoly of legitimate violence (Lukes and Scull 1984).