Might makes right or Might is right is an aphorism on the origin of morality, with both descriptive and prescriptive senses. Descriptively, it asserts that a society's view of right and wrong is determined by those in power, with a meaning similar to "History is written by the victors". That is, although all people have their personal ideas of the good, only those strong enough to overcome obstacles and enemies can put their ideas into effect, and spread their own standards to society at large. Montague defined kratocracy or kraterocracy (from the , meaning "strong") as a government based on coercive power, by those strong enough to seize control through physical violence or demagogic manipulation. "Might makes right" has been described as the credo of totalitarian regimes. The sociologist Max Weber analyzed the relations between a state's power and its moral authority in . Realist scholars of international politics use the phrase to describe the "state of nature" in which power determines the relations among sovereign states (ruling out diplomacy, mutual respect, use of patience, reason and understanding, or the intellect). Prescriptively (or normatively), the phrase is most often used pejoratively, to protest perceived tyranny. The phrase sometimes has a positive connotation in the context of master morality or social Darwinism, which hold that a society's strongest members should rule and determine its standards of right and wrong, as well as its goals for the greater good. History The idea of "woe to the conquered" is vividly expressed in Homer, in the hawk parable from Hesiod's Works and Days, and in Livy, in which the equivalent Latin phrase "vae victis" is first recorded. The idea, though not the wording, has been attributed to the History of the Peloponnesian War 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." In the first chapter of Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus claims that "justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger", which Socrates then disputes. Callicles in Gorgias argues similarly that the strong should rule the weak, as a right owed to their superiority. The first commonly quoted use of "might makes right" in English was in 1846 by the American pacifist and abolitionist Adin Ballou (1803–1890), who wrote, "But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute