The Public World

Abstract

The last two chapters have surveyed those areas of domestic politics where social cohesion is lost and formed. It is in these areas, on behalf of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, or whatever enthusiasm should command the time, that the fissure between state and society is opened. My description has been inward, concerned with the motives of cohesion and their ratification in the status quo. But society has both a public and a private life. It declares itself through gestures of authority, which embrace citizen and alien alike. The state is the completion, and also the champion, of society. It is only through the formation of a state that a society can come into direct, secure and explicit relation with its neighbours.