This article will help you to differentiate between society and state.
(a) By ‘Society’ we mean the whole sum of voluntary bodies, or associations, contained in the nation (and even ramifying beyond it by the connexions which they establish with similar bodies in other nations), with all their various purposes and with all their institutions. Taken together, and regarded as a whole, these associations form the social substance which goes by the general and comprehensive name of ‘Society’.
Taken separately, and regarded in themselves, they generally show and share two features: first, they are essentially voluntary in origin: secondly, they are essentially specific in purpose, each existing for some one purpose—religious, economic, educational, charitable, or ‘social’ in that narrower sense in which we speak of any of the purposes of our ordinary human intercourse (such as the common enjoyment of sport or the common cultivation of leisure) as being a ‘social purpose’.
But if each, taken separately, thus exists for a specific purpose, all taken together exist for a number and a variety of purposes. In view of the many and various purposes of its parts, we may accordingly say that Society does, in Burke’s words, constitute ‘a partnership in all science, … in all art, … in every virtue and in all perfection’; and we may even say that, so conceived, Society is in a sense total or ‘totalitarian’. But to say that is not to say—indeed it is a very different thing from saying—that the State, which has its own separate basis and its own peculiar character, is also ‘totalitarian’.
(b) What, then, is the separate basis and the peculiar character of the State? By ‘the State’ we mean a particular and special association, existing for the special purpose of maintaining a compulsory scheme of legal order, and acting therefore through Jaws enforced by prescribed and definite sanctions.
The State, as a rule, is national in its scope (though a given State may be multi-national), just as Society also is national: in other words, most States are what we call ‘national States’. But if, on this point, the State agrees with Society—or, more exactly, is coextensive with Society—it also differs (and differs profoundly) from the associations other than itself which we call, in their sum, by the name of ‘Society’. It differs in two respects.
First, it includes all the members of the stock which inhabits its space or territory, and it includes them all as a matter of necessity: other associations include only some (though a national church, in Sweden for instance, may include nearly all), and they include these on a voluntary basis.
Secondly, the State has the power of using legal coercion, the power of enforcing obedience, under the sanction of punishment, to ordained rules of behaviour; other associations, in virtue of their voluntary basis, can apply only social discipline, and can expect only voluntary obedience to agreed ways of behaviour, obedience enforced in the last resort by the sanction of exclusion from membership.
We may therefore say of the State that while it is an association like other associations, in the sense of being a union of men for the purpose of acting as social or partners in the realization of a common purpose, it is also an association which is unlike other associations, in the sense of having a unique purpose (the purpose of maintaining a compulsory scheme of legal order) which gives it the unique scope of including compulsorily all the persons resident in a given territory and the unique power of making law and using legal coercion.
The distinction here stated is a problem, or rather a cause of problems, as well as a distinction. On the argument which has been followed a nation is simultaneously, and coextensively, two things in one. It is a social substance, or Society, constituted of and by a sum of voluntary associations, which have mainly grown of themselves—in the sense that they have been formed by voluntary and spontaneous combination—and which desire to act and to realize their purposes as far as possible by themselves.
That is one side of the nation. The other side (which we may call either the reverse or the obverse, according to our preference) is that it is a political, or, as it is perhaps better called, a legal substance; a single compulsory association including all, and competent, in all cases where it sees fit, to make and enforce rules for all.