The Birth of the Liberal Society

The liberal society might be supposed to have emerged directly from anarchy, spontaneously or in a social contract; or the liberal society might be supposed to have emerged indirectly by a roundabout process in which anarchy gave way in the first instance to despotism and then despotism gave way to a liberal society. The liberal society, for the purposes of this paper, is a society with an economy based on private property and with a polity based on majority rule voting. Anarchy is a society without law or government in which people divide their time among production, defending what they have produced and taking goods form others. Despotism is a society with a ruling class that exploits the rest of the population as a shepherd exploits a flock of sheep. It makes more sense to suppose that the liberal society evolved by the indirect route through despotism than to suppose that it evolved directly out of anarchy.