As Albert Jay Nock argued in the 1930s, and Robert Nisbet in the 1960s, the state plays a zero-sum game: It desires to assume all power over society, even to the point of taking the place of the Church as the glue that holds all together, and thus it renders society obsolete in the long run.
...Society, for Nisbet, consisted of a myriad of various spontaneous, natural, and chosen associations, groups, friendships. These were, for Nisbet, what Edmund Burke had labeled our “little platoons.” They arose from specific moments and specific manifestations, unique in placement, but universal in substance. Typically, religion has served as the glue for all of these institutions.
...These social institutions created the true social bonds that hold us together, person by person, family by family, and generation by generation. Such a society of competing associations, institutions, and authorities allows for the true freedom of society and the creativity of individuals.
...States, though, in contrast to societies, separate themselves from their contexts, their times, and their situations to become something autonomous and, then, superior.
A part of society but also apart from society, the state exists uniquely as the one agency that claims to have a monopoly on force and sovereignty....
...Unlike society, in which all can gain and progress, the state plays a zero-sum game, according to Nock (and, subsequently, according to Nisbet). “Just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own,” Nock explained on page one of his 1935 book. “All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn.”
As the State grows, the social atrophies to the point—Nock claimed, echoing the arguments of Alexis de Tocqueville—in which members of society no longer even think of trying to solve their own problems, but, rather, automatically and reflexively turn to the State for solutions.
...As Nock understood it in the 1930s, and Nisbet in the 1960s, the State desired—whether it openly admitted this or not—to assume all power over society and thus render society—and its myriads of conflicting authorities (in and through which the human person found freedom)—obsolete in the long run....