Comparative Study — State and Government, State and Society, State and Association

Your college is an association, your neighbourhood is a slice of society, and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is a government — none of the three is a State, and mixing them up on an answer sheet is the single most common way marks are lost in this module.

In two minutes

State, Government, Society and Association are four different ideas that share overlapping vocabulary in everyday speech — the State is the sovereign whole; Government is its working machinery; Society is the wider human network the State exists within; and an Association is any voluntary body pursuing a limited common purpose, with membership that is optional.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.