Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay "Critique of Violence" offers a powerful and unique examination of the legal justification of violence and state power. Benjamin contends that a critique of violence requires a "philosophy of its history," and the model he offers challenges traditional approaches to the question of legal violence: instead of considering the circumstances in which violence may be justified legally, he considers the law itself as a kind of violence, and suggests that modern legal systems struggle to do justice to the violence to which they owe their existence.