From The Vocation Lectures: Politics as a Vocation (Max Weber, 1919) pp32-3
What do we mean by politics? The concept is extremely broad and includes every kind of independent leadership activity. We can speak of the foreign exchange policies of the banks, the interest rate policy of the Reichsbank, the politics of a trade union in a strike; we can speak of educational policy in a town or village community, the policies of the board of management of an association, and even of the political maneuverings [Politik] of a shrewd wife seeking to influence her husband. Needless to say, this concept is far too broad for us to consider his evening. Today we shall consider only the leadership, or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political organization, in other words a state.
But looking at the question through the eyes of a sociologist, what is a “political” organization? What is a “state”? A state, too, cannot be defined sociologically by enumerating its activities. There is almost no task that a political organization has not undertaken at one time or another; but by the same token there are no tasks of which we could say that they were always, let alone exclusively, proper to the organizations that we call political, and nowadays refer to as states, or that historically were the forerunners of the modern state. 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 3 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 terri-tory—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.
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