Apologies for skipping much of the conversation. A real life tragedy in motion over my way. That aside, I believe Hannah Arendt's
does an amazing job at filling in the vital details here from the ancient Grecian values of koinonia and idios, shifting over time, due to figures like Aquinas improperly substituting the Roman word Social (which has no meaning in Grecian thought, because all animals are social, and thus it is a limitation of necessity on all biological life) for the concept Koinonia was the beginning of the betrayal in shifting away from the ancient way of thought... so I'll leave this from Arendt's book for others to mull over, before this she goes over the betrayal of Vita Activa in favor of Vita Contemplativa...
The profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin transla- tion of "political" as "social" is perhaps nowhere clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aquinas compares the nature of household rule with political rule: the head of the household, he finds, has some similarity to the head of the kingdom, but, he adds, his power is not so "perfect" as that of the king. 11 Not only in Greece and the polls but throughout the whole of occidental an- tiquity, it would indeed have been self-evident that even the power of the tyrant was less great, less "perfect" than the power with which the paterfamilias, the dominus, ruled over his household of slaves and family... Although misunderstanding and equating the political and social realms is as old as the translatio n of Greek terms into Latin and their adaption to Roman-Christian thought, it has become even more confusing in modern usage and modem understanding of society.
The distinction between a private and a public sphere of life corresponds to the household and the political realms, which have existed as distinct, separate entities at least since the rise of the ancient city-state; but the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a rela- tively new phenomenon whose or igin coincided with the emer- gence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state. What concerns us in this context is the extraordinary difficulty with which we, because of this development, understand the deci- sive division between the public and private realms, between the sphere of the polls and the sphere of household and family, and, finally, between activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life, a division upon which all ancient political thought rested as self-evident and axiomatic.
In our understanding, the dividing line is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping. The scien- tific thought that corresponds to this development is no longer political science but " national economy" or "social economy" or Volkswirtschaft, all of which indicate a kind of "collective house-keeping"; 13 the collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family is what we call "society," and its political form of organization is called "nation." 14
We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters, the very term "political economy" would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was " eco- nomic," related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household affair by definition. 16 Historically, it is very likely that the rise of the city-state and the public realm occurred at the expense of the private realm of family and household. 16 Yet the old sanctity of the hearth, though much less pronounced in classical Greece than in ancient Rome, was never entirely lost. What prevented the polis from violating the private lives of its citizens and made it hold sacred the bound- aries surrounding each property was not respect for private property as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he had no location in it which was properly his own. 17
Even Plato, whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing any contradiction. 18 The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs. The driving force was life itself—the penates, the household gods, were, according to Plutarch, "the gods who make us live and nourish our body" 19—which, for its individual maintenance and its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others. That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household there- fore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it.
The realm of the polls, on the contrary, was the sphere of free- dom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polls. Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society —a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of property-owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers, as in Marx, or a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries. In all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government.
What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polls life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenome- non, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world.
This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimmla, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical neces- sity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man- made violence. This twofold and doubled "unhappiness" of slavery is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave. Thus, a poor free man preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing labor market to regular assured wo rk, which, because it restricted his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be servitude (douleia) , and even harsh, painful labor was preferred to the easy life of many household slaves. — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition pg 27-31
Real life pulling me away. Hope that helps moving forward in the discussion.