But perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber). On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their
...more
