Prologue: The Pillar Nobody Built The State was constructed by conquerors. The Corporation was chartered by kings. Civil Society, by contrast, was assembled by people who had run out of better options. No founding moment, no constitutional convention, no royal seal. The trade union that formed in a Manchester pub in 1818 was not a planned institution. The abolition society that met in a Philadelphia print shop in 1775 was not legislated into existence. The mutual aid fraterni