 Machiavelli has also been credited (most recently by Skinner 1978) with formulating for the first time the “modern concept of the state”, understood in the broadly Weberian sense of an impersonal form of rule possessing a monopoly of coercive authority within a set territorial boundary. Certainly, the term lo stato appears widely in Machiavelli's writings, especially in The Prince, in connection with the acquisition and application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning distinct from the Latin term status (condition or station) from which it is derived. Moreover, scholars cite Machiavelli's influence in shaping the early modern debates surrounding “reason of state”—the doctrine that the good of the state itself takes precedence over all other considerations, whether morality or the good of citizens—as evidence that he was received by his near-contemporaries as a theorist of the state (Meineke 1924 [1957]). Machiavelli's name and doctrines were widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state in the age of absolutism.