Lenin's blunt emphasis on control over organized coercion as central to what states are and do fits nicely with the dominant social science definition of the state provided by his German contemporary, Max Weber. Weber, we recall, defines the state in the following way: “[A] compulsory political organization will be called ‘a state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to be the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” Alternatively, in a different work, Weber uses a slightly different formulation: “[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The minor differences, although potentially interesting, seem less central than the focus on the effort to claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Although many scholars have criticized Weber's definition and provided alternatives, his approach is still the most widely accepted one and represents the pivot around which most definitional debates turn. For example, Joel Migdal, who pioneered the influential “state-in-society” approach, asserts that Weber's definition of the state “has led scholars down sterile paths.” He proposes a “new definition” of the state that will reorient further research. The key to Migdal's definition involves separating “the image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory” from “the actual practices of its multiple parts.”