Society and the State: Primacy of the Social Over the Political

The general tendency of MacIver’s views on state-society relationship suggests that he is critical of the idealist political thinkers like Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Bosanquet, who do not differentiate between the two. In his The Modern State, MacIver terms as ‘grossest of all confusions’ to identify the social with the political.⁴⁹ For MacIver, society is prior to the State and the latter exists only within society. Further, the State serves only a limited purpose in terms of the system of order and control and regulating relationships of human beings in society. This regulation is to give a form of unity to the whole system of social relationships. Existence of society and many of the associations embedded in social relationships like familial affiliations, religious identification, emotional and cultural expressions are independent of the State sanction and regulation. Thus, MacIver tends to assigns primacy to society over the State.