Plato gives many excellent sociological descriptions of this ‘natural’, i.e. tribal and collectivist, mode of social life: ‘The law’, he writes in the Republic, ‘… is designed to bring about the welfare of the state as a whole, fitting the citizens into one unit, by means of both persuasion and force. It makes them all share in whatever benefit each of them can contribute to the community. And it is actually the law which creates for the state men of the right frame of mind; not for the purpose of letting them loose, so that everybody can go his own way, but in order to utilize them all for
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