Meaning of “All society therefore is either for gain, or…”

Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book I, Chapter II, William Ellis translation; represented through the Dent edition first issued in 1912 and Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle argues that the city is a natural association and says that man is naturally a political animal; this remains ancient political philosophy in translation, not a modern empirical classification.

The Subjection of Women (1869), Chapter II, printed page 79, Project Gutenberg #27083. Mill contrasts command-and-obedience relations with equal association and states that society in equality is the normal state toward which improving social relations should move.

Thoughts on Government, April 1776, represented by Founders Online / National Archives. Adams develops an eighteenth-century republican theory of government grounded in public virtue; the sentence is historical political philosophy, not a modern empirical law.

Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 482, “Repeated Once More”; Helen Zimmern translation.

Unto This Last, fourth essay; Project Gutenberg #36541. The line follows Ruskin’s distinction between production and consumption and retains the nineteenth-century political-economy setting.

The Federalist No. 51, February 1788. The line sits inside Madison’s argument for checks and balances and institutional controls; it is political theory about constitutional design rather than a factual measurement of human nature.