Mutual self-interest leads men to combine in setting up...

Mutual self-interest leads men to combine in setting up constraining rules to forbid aggression and lust, and powerful agencies to inflict sanctions on those who break the rules. Some of these rules constitute morality; others law. A good deal of variation is possible in the way that this intellectual fairy tale is told, but its central themes, like those of all good fairy tales, are remarkably constant.

And above all, at the heart of the account there remains the idea that social life is perhaps chronologically and certainly logically secondary to a form of unconstrained non-social human life in which what men do is a matter of their individual natural…