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But states don’t just create rules and enforce them violently. They’re not simply dispassionate judges, sitting atop society to preserve order for the public’s benefit. Every single state that exists or has existed uses those rules and that violence to do roughly four big things:

- collect resources from the people under its jurisdiction;

- define a territory that it controls and police its boundaries;

- administer its territory and subject population; and

- mobilize the labor of people under its jurisdiction for the state’s purposes.

Lots of different kinds of social organizations engage in one or more of these activities. A temple might collect tithes; a forager band might patrol its territory. But put them all together and you have something very state-like; marry that to a monopoly on violence and you have the state.

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