The state is the ideal expression of society

The argument

This argument treats the state as the form a society takes when it acts on its shared goals — which is why, on this account, the state is society's ideal expression and society itself is best understood as sharing a common goal. A distinction has to be drawn first. As R. J. Rummel notes, the state should not be confused with the political power, or government, of the state, since those political systems change over time. Governments come and go, are voted out and overthrown; the state persists through all of it. What persists is the framework within which the people of a territory can work together for their common interest, and it is the framework rather than its current administrators that the argument is about. Many scholars and philosophers have discussed the connection between state and society, but it is the common goals of a society that make the state its ideal expression. Aristotle held that the state, in the form of the city-state, could meet the needs and goals of a society's culture, economy, politics and religion. The breadth of that list is the point: these are separate domains of life, and the state is presented as the one institution capable of addressing all of them together rather than each in isolation. The connection runs from the individual outward. Society shapes a person's beliefs, and therefore their goals — what people want is formed by the society they are raised in rather than arrived at independently. Those shared goals then need a structure through which they can be pursued, and the state supplies it: societal groups within a state can work together to allocate public resources, to protect the rights of citizens and to organise for social transformation. Each of those activities requires collective agreement on what is worth doing. Because the state exists to realise such goals, it is the ideal expression of society — and society is what shares them.

Context

The state serves to clearly define our collective goals and enact a set of rules that will foster progress towards these goals.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The state is not an expression of society, it is a crude parasite on societies’ backs. Society can be understood as the sum of all of our voluntary interactions with each other. We form societies naturally by interacting and connecting as individuals. The state grows off the back of these interactions and tries to impose limits on them. This isn’t an “ideal expression” of society, but a gross attempt to control society and the individuals within it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Separating the state from its government leaves the premise describing an abstraction rather than any institution that acts, since states act through governments — and those actions include constraining the cooperation the premise credits them with enabling. [Rejecting P2] Aristotle's polis was a small city-state of enfranchised citizens, so a claim built on it does not transfer to the modern state, and the citation establishes what one philosopher held rather than that the claim is true. [Rejecting P3] Association, exchange and mutual aid realise shared goals without a state, so even if society shapes people's goals it does not follow that the state is the structure through which they are realised, still less the ideal one.