I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up wit

I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing): 1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household. 2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis. (As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.) Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure. Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress). A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture. There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals? I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.