The crucial difference between liberalism and republicanism consists in how the role of the democratic process is understood. According do the liberal view, this process accomplishes the task of Programming the state in the interest of society, where the state is conceived as an apparatus of public administration and society is conceived as a system of market-structured interactions of private persons and their labor. Here politics (in the sense of the citizens political will-formate) has the function of bundling together and bringing to bear private social interests against a state apparatus that Specializes in the administrative employment of poiiticai, power for collective goals.