The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave… A gang of robbers, which because of the comparative weakness of its forces has no prospect of successfully resisting for any length of time the forces of another organization, is not entitled to be called a state... The pogrom gangs in imperial Russia were not a state because they could kill and plunder only thanks to the connivance of the government.
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Auburn: Alabama, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010, p. 46, (first published by Yale 1944)