[5] The sociologist Max Weber analyzed the relations between a state's power and its moral authority in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
[6] The idea, though not the wording, has been attributed to the History of the Peloponnesian War, written around 410 BC by the ancient historian Thucydides, who stated that "right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
"[7] In the first chapter of Plato's Republic, authored around 375 BC Thrasymachus claims that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger", which Socrates then disputes.
"[10] The related idea of "woe to the conquered" is stated by Livy, in which the similar Latin phrase "vae victis" is first recorded.
[12] In 1846, the American pacifist and abolitionist Adin Ballou (1803–1890) wrote, "But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust.