A proper understanding of society, the one held for the majority of Western history as a matter of fact, was to understand society as a family.
Let me ask you, if we exist in a "social contract" when did you sign this contract? Or agree to it in any way? Were we not born into this society as one is born into a family?
This made more sense to people I suppose when family meant something, in the old countries of Europe where one's family roots could go back centuries and those things mattered to people.
Here in our modern, rootless nation an atomized concept that the individual makes a contract with society seems natural, in fact so natural most people cannot concieve of any other model.
Robert Filmer in Patriarcha (1680) wrote:
10. In all kingdoms or commonwealths in the world, whether the prince be the supreme father of the people or but the true heir of such a father, or whether he come to the crown by usurpation, or by election of the nobles or of the people, or by any other way whatsoever, or whether some few or a multitude govern the commonwealth, yet still the authority that is in any one, or in many, or in all these, is the only right and natural authority of a supreme father. There is and always shall be continued to the end of the world a natural right of a supreme father over every multitude, although, by the secret will of God, many at first do most unjustly obtain the exercise of it.
To confirm this natural right of regal power, we find in the Decalogue that the law which enjoins obedience to kings is delivered in the terms of "Honour thy father," as if all power were originally in the father. If obedience to parents be immediately due by a natural law, and subjection to princes but by the mediation of a human ordinance, what reason is there that the laws of nature should give place to the laws of men, as we see the power of the father over his child gives place and is subordinate to the power of the magistrate? If we compare the natural rights of a father with those of a king, we find them all one, without any difference at all but only in the latitude or extent of them: as the father over one family, so the king, as father over many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct, and defend the whole commonwealth. His war, his peace, his courts of justice, and all his acts of sovereignty, tend only to preserve and distribute to every subordinate and inferior father, and to their children, their rights and privileges, so that all the duties of a king are summed up in an universal fatherly care of his people. BTW it was in response to this work that Locke penned his Two Treatise on Government in 1690.
Locke's work ressurected the democratist idealogy that had been successfully buried for centuries by the West's 2 chief experiences with democratic governance - the execution of Socrates and the Cruxification of Jesus Christ. Of course Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are the most signficant influences on the thought of the men that wrote the US Constitution. No wonder we are so screwed up.
Aristotle agrees with this model of the society as a family in Politics, Book 1 when he analyzes it as one. Of course Aristotle did err when he stated the state was prior to the family, while his reasoning is sound, divine revelation teaches otherwise. The family is prior to the state since the family is the basic organization of man.