Green on Social Contract Theory
"If political society is supposed to have originated in a pact at all, the difference between it and the preceding state of nature cannot with any plausibility be held to have been much more than a difference between a society regulated by written law and officers with defined power and one regulated by customs and tacitly recognized authority." -- Principles of Political Obligation , p. 46 This is an important point contra those who fantasize about "doing away with politics": there is no evidence of people anywhere ever having lived in a society without politics. Today, we just have more formally organized politics extending over wider domains than in the past.