On my view of political legitimacy, the state is legitimate to the extent that its agents use state power for the right purposes. The right purposes are those that form the raison d’être of the state. This raises the question what the raison d’être of the state is. In this chapter, I propose three categories of goals. All these goals can be regarded as constitutive of making the state a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. 1. Safety from malice and misfortune. It is the purpose of the state to protect people’s life, in order to make sure that people do not die prematurely and enjoy the basic conditions of creating a life for themselves. This is intrinsically important, and it contributes to the creation of an environment in which cooperation between people can flourish. 2. Protection of pre-institutional rights. To a large extent, this goal overlaps with the first goal, seeing as threats to one’s life often result from a rights violation. However, the categories are not coextensive. Some threats (like illness or exposure to harsh weather) are not rights violations. Moreover, there are rights violations (e.g. of property) that do not pose a direct threat to one’s life. For rights protection, like for safety, it holds that it is both intrinsically important, and instrumentally important for cooperative opportunities. 3. Benefits. I argue that at least subsistence should be among the benefits that it is the purpose of the state to provide, even if the threat that lack of subsistence poses is not due to malice or misfortune.