Let us conclude the matter as follows.
Human beings need government to protect their rights. Nothing more.
How is government to be constructed? How is it to be administered?
Let’s consider a fundamental question: is the State an entity in itself, or is it a mere label, an abstraction for processes beyond the capacity of one individual to understand?
The State is a label applied by few to run the lives of many. As Thomas Paine noted, the state is a necessary evil at best. Human beings placed in positions of power will take the position that their way of running things is best. However, their understanding of any situation will be inevitably limited because human knowledge is limited.
The Ancient Greeks believed, however, that the State defined an individual. It was the State that made a person better. But if the State in fact does not exist, how can it do anything? Furthermore, the State cannot be defined by a General Will or Collective Agreement because human beings are too varied and diverse. The needs of the many are too great to be foreseen and planned by a select few, no matter how wise, no matter how moral. The Ancient Greeks believed that the Polis would make men good. What they failed to realize is that men make the state, and men cannot make themselves good. The traditions that enable communities to survive thrive above and beyond the limited reason and awareness of individual thinkers.
Society as a force, Society with a capital S, simply does not exist.
The Ancients insisted on placing a name and form on the mysterious combination of heterogeneous forces which made markets possible, and which enriched Athens. Samuel Britain correctly concluded that capitalism breeds and anti-capitalist atmosphere. The Ancient Greeks enjoyed material success, which gave them the leisure time to contemplate how that success came about, or what caused it. The traditions that brought man out of an atavistic tribal life engender reason, and human beings then assume that with reason they can understand the catallactic forces. From there, they believe that they can improve upon them with the proper planning.
Michel Foucault delivered a serious of lectures under the heading “Il faut defendre la societe” “Defendre” cannot be translated into English, because it can mean both “defend” and “forbid, prevent”
Socrates played the role of Athen’s “defender” and “preventer”. He was the pharmakon, the cure and the disease, of Athens. Its scourge and its scapegoat. This contradiction exists because Society as a concept, a force forcing itself upon individual members, does not exist. As long as Socrates lived, he was a living reminder to the citizens of Athens that the Society which they claimed would make men better did not exist. He asserted that the god was his guide to righteous conduct, an individual, unique, solitary path which did not intersect with the public. Socrates as an ethical man forced the people of Athens to acknowledge that men are both public and private, and that the private part of a man cannot be ruled, but must be protected. The role of government is to protect the private man from deprivation by his neighbor, not to make him an ideal according to a collective standard, a standard which cannot accommodate the ideals of every other man in the community, especially for a community that grew as quickly as Athens did.
A man is flesh and blood, not just an abstraction. He cannot be calculated merely as a cog in a wheel. Socrates asserted this individual nature, which threatened the tribal mentality of the conservative democrats who had regained power in Athens.