From Politics as a Vocation (Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures) p33
It is rather the case that in the final analysis the modern state can be defined only sociologically by the specific means that are peculiar to it, as to every political organization: namely, physical violence. “Every state is based on force,” Trotsky remarked at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed the case. If there existed only societies in which violence was unknown as a means, then the concept of the “state” would disappear; in that event what would have emerged is what, in this specific meaning of the word, we might call “anarchy.” Violence is, of course, not the normal or the only means available to the state. That is undeniable. But it is the means specific to the state. And the relationship of the state to violence is particularly close at the present time. In the past the use of physical violence by widely differing organizations—starting with the clan—was completely normal. Nowadays, in contrast, we must say that the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory—and this idea of “territory” is an essential defining feature. For what is specific to the present is that all other organizations or individuals can assert the right to use physical violence only insofar as the state permits them to do so. The state is regarded as the sole source of the “right” to use violence. Hence, what “politics” means for us is to strive for a share of power or to influence the distribution of power, whether between states or between the groups of people contained within a state.
This corresponds in all essentials to common parlance. When we say that a question is “political,” that a minister or official is “political,” or that a decision has been made on “political” grounds, we always mean the same thing. This is that the interests involved in the distribution or preservation of power, or a shift in power, play a decisive role in resolving that question, or in influencing that decision or defining the sphere of activity of the official concerned.
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