… is from page 12 of Deirdre McCloskey’s essay “Max Weber Was Wrong,” which appears in the November 2017 issue of Reason:
Now Weber was a very learned and intelligent scholar. After all, he gave us the true definition of government, namely, a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. It is a definition as full and accurate as it is sadistically useful for torturing our mild social democratic friends in Sweden or Massachusetts, who like to believe that the government is a festival of kindly collectivism, sort of like a loving family.