How should a society control itself?

[I]t is not necessary to choose between social control administered by the aggrandized state [collectivism] and a self-assertive individualism subject to no social control [libertarianism]. That supposedly exclusive choice, which causes such furious party antagonism in our society, overlooks entirely one of the oldest, best established, and most successful methods of social control in human experience. It is social control, not by authority from above commanding this man to do this and that man to do that, but social control by a common law which defines the reciprocal rights and duties of persons and invites them to enforce the law by proving their case in a court of law.

This method of social control is, I submit, the appropriate method for a self-governing people to use. [...] This method of social control the founders of the American Constitution took for granted, like the air they breathed. [...]

Truly conceived, a democracy is not the government of a people by elected representatives exercising the prerogatives of their former lords and masters. It is government of the people by a common law [that] is defined, applied, and amended by the representatives of the people.

-- Walter Lippmann, The Good Society, 1937