A social system is a set of moral-political-economic principles embodied in a
society’s laws, institutions, and government, which determine the
relationships, the terms of association, among the men living in a given
geographical area. It is obvious that these terms and relationships depend on
an identification of man’s nature, that they would be different if they pertain
to a society of rational beings or to a colony of ants. It is obvious that they
will be radically different if men deal with one another as free, independent
individuals, on the premise that every man is an end in himself—or as members
of a pack, each regarding the others as the means to his ends and to the ends
of “the pack as a whole.”
There are only two fundamental questions (or two aspects of the same question)
that determine the nature of any social system: Does a social system recognize
individual rights?—and: Does a social system ban physical force from human
relationships? The answer to the second question is the practical
implementation of the answer to the first.