Society

The first clause defines and the second warns. A society is a tightly bound network of heavily interdependent relationships, which is a description of dependency rather than of shared identity or territory, and the framework's account of independence follows from it, since nobody lives free of dependencies and what looks like independence is currency abstracting the relation and endosocialism denying the labour. The warning is that the word is often used to describe authoritative endogroups, which are not the same thing. An endogroup is bounded by a membrane and defined by inclusion and shunning, and calling it society lends it the legitimacy of the interdependence it has captured. Marsh's community entry supplies the related distinction, since a community is a group affiliated around allocation of common resources and may be a society, where allocation runs through social relationships, or a trade economy, where it runs through trade. So a society allocates through relationship, which is what makes it dense rather than transactional. Her criticisms follow the substitution. Marginalized members of any society seldom enjoy the rights that form society's contract with them, and where people look for the source of flaws in systems of dissociation they are always pointed at those not behaving as taxpayers rather than at the real leeches. The false independence she describes runs on real societal support all along, including medical care and assistance in emergencies, and the dissociation serves to make some feel entitled and others indebted.

Sociology has never settled on a definition, with Durkheim's organic solidarity describing interdependence through the division of labour, Tonnies contrasting community with association, and later theorists including John Urry questioning whether society, understood as a bounded national container, is a usable unit at all. Methodological nationalism names the criticized habit of equating society with the nation state, which is close to Marsh's warning about authoritative endogroups. Her definition is unusual in making interdependence the whole content, which detaches society from both territory and identity and leaves only the density of relationships as the criterion.