the "first to attempt a systematic definition" of "the state" was "a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering" (in the late nineteenth century)
his defintion: "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)"
Graeber / Wengrow 359
However, "[t]o retain Ihering and Weber's definition, one would either have to conclude that, say, Hammurabi's Babylon, Socrates' Athens or England under William the Conqueror weren't states at all--or come up with a more flexible or nuanced defintion. Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage [...] The definition brought Babylon, Athens and medieval England back into the fold, but also introduced new conceptual problems"
"[M]ost contemporary theorists of social evolution" now believe something like "since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state," despite the fact that this "logic is entirely circular"
Graeber and Wengrow want to as "what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entitu is what we would like to describe as a 'state' and another isn't?" (362)