Culture And Society
Society is the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture is whatever we do with each other by undirected choice. If society is all that a people feels it must do, culture "is the realm of the variable, free, not necessarily universal, of all that cannot lay claim to compulsive authority " (Burckhardt).
Society is not to be confused with, say, natural instinct, or any other form of involuntary activity. Society remains entirely within our free choice in quite the same way that competition, however strenuous or costly to the player, never prevents the player from walking of the field of play. Society applies only to those areas of action which are believed to be necessary.
Culture can not be authentic if held within the boundaries of a society. It is often the strategy of a society to initiate and embrace a culture as exclusively its own. Culture so bounded may even be so lavishly subsidized and encouraged by society that it has the appearance of open-ended activity, but in fact it is designed to serve societal interests in every case - like the socialist realism of Soviet art.
Society and culture are therefore not true opponents of each other. Rather society is a species of culture that persists in contradicting itself, a freely organized attempt to conceal the freedom of the organizers and the organized, an attempt to forget that we have willfully forgotten our decision to enter this or that contest and to continue in it.
-James P Carse (in his book finite and infinite games).
