Around 2,500 years ago, Ancient Greece experimented with both democracy (Athens) and dictatorship (Sparta, Macedonia, and others). And the Roman republic and empire maintained elaborate political structures for nearly a millennium. Italian republics flourished in the late Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, with Venice surviving until Napoleon conquered it in 1797. And England got its Magna Carta in 1215 that introduced checks and balances between the king and the aristocracy. These systems, even if better than what came before in certain respects, took collectivism as a given, implemented statist social systems to organize society, and accepted the alleged right of some group to violate the rights of the individual in the name of God, king, or country. Nobody thought fundamentally outside the collectivist-statist box.
Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right 