  An obvious objection to this view is that a state needs instrumental as well as noninstrumental laws; no state can function without issuing orders and framing policies to secure compliance, raise revenue, defend itself against enemies, and so forth. Oakeshott would not disagree. Any actual state is a mixture of formal and substantive elements, procedures and policies, civil and enterprise association. But defining civil association does not mean identifying the features of an actual state; it means identifying the “postulates” of civil association as a mode of association. These are attributes of a state that determine its civil character and distinguish it from states in which that character is recessive or even suppressed, as in a despotism. Cives are united in their recognition of the authority of lex and of the obligations it prescribes. The law identified as lex constrains citizens in the same way that Hobbes said hedges constrain travelers: keeping them on the roads without prescribing their destinations (Leviathan, ch. 30). To say that the laws in a civitas are authoritative is to say that their recognition as law is independent of whether cives approve of the obligations they prescribe. Similarly, to consider the desirability of a law in civil association is to engage in an activity narrowly focused on the question of whether that law is an appropriate expression of respublica, conceived not as a substantive good, interest, or purpose but as rules, procedures, and offices governing the conduct of the associates (OHC 147–149): this is the res publica, the “public concern”, which is the proper subject for political deliberation in civil association. In an actual state, however, the public concern includes substantive goods that follow from or are needed to sustain the rule of law, for it is the rule of law that defines the civil condition. These goods, as Kant and others have observed, might include policing, roads, schools, hospitals, and social security (Ripstein 2009: chs. 8 and 9). Civil laws do not violate the premises of civil association when they redress “public bads” such as poverty, epidemic disease, or air pollution (de Jongh 2022). There is, in short, ample room for welfare concerns within the civil condition, once the idea of civil association is brought down to earth. 