The state

In plain terms

The state is the thing that keeps running when the government changes. Courts, revenue, police, records, the army - an apparatus that outlasts whoever is in charge of it.

That permanence is what makes it distinctive and what makes it a problem. It concentrates the capacity for organised violence in one place and claims that its use of it is the only lawful use. Every other institution needs its permission; it needs nobody's.

So the question is what could justify that. The standard answer is that the alternative is worse - that without it, disputes are settled by whoever is stronger, which is a state of affairs nobody would choose. Whether that is true, and whether it justifies this state rather than some other arrangement, is where two centuries of argument sit.

As a philosopher would put it

Weber's definition: a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. It is definitional rather than normative, and it makes the state a means rather than an end.

Justifications divide. Contractarian accounts derive it from what rational people would agree to; Nozick's minimal state is derived from a state of nature by an invisible-hand process without anyone's rights being violated, and he argues anything more extensive cannot be. Marxist accounts treat the state as an instrument of class rule, withering away once classes do.

Anarchist arguments deny that any justification succeeds: Wolff's version holds that the duty of autonomy and the authority of the state are incompatible, since obeying because one is commanded is precisely the abdication of moral agency.

Scott's work adds an empirical dimension - states make populations legible in order to govern them, through censuses, surnames, cadastral maps and standard measures, and legibility itself reshapes what it records.

What is actually disputed

Whether the state can be justified at all.

The contractarian argument is that rational agents in a state of nature would agree to it, and its weakness is that nobody was in a state of nature and nobody agreed. The consequentialist argument is that the alternatives are worse, which justifies having some state and says nothing about the entitlement of the one you have.

Philosophical anarchists accept that states may be useful and deny that anyone has a duty to obey, which is a narrower and much harder position to refute than the popular sense of anarchism suggests.

The Marxist critique cuts differently: the question of justification assumes the state is a neutral apparatus that could be used well, and the analysis is that its form is determined by the relations of production it maintains. On that account asking whether the state is justified is like asking whether a hammer is fair.