Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the independent existence of government and the structure of the state

The State must always be ready to sacrifice the government for the people, and not the people for the government.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.

in order that the body of the Government may have an existence of its own, a real life that distinguishes it from the body of the State, in order that all its members may act in concert and answer to the end for which it was instituted, it must have a particular self, a sensibility common to its members, a force, a will of its own tending to its preservation. This particular existence presupposes Assemblies, Councils, a power of deliberating and resolving, rights, titles and privileges belonging exclusively to the prince and making the lot of the magistrate the more honourable the more laborious it is. The difficulties lie in the manner of so ordering this subordinate whole within the whole that it does not damage the general constitution by strengthening its own; that it always distinguishes its particular force, intended for its own preservation, from the public force, intended for the preservation of the State; and that, in a word, it is always ready to sacrifice the Government to the people, and not the people to the Government