The Importance of Right in a Society

Nozick says there's a great history of the notion of an individual right dominating society. But if you have a whole society which is organized without one of these central concepts, it would need a very strong argument to convince me that the concept of right was still a good idea. The Greeks had no concept of a right and yet, right still somehow were there. Right as a concept that only makes sense relative to a given set of social institutions.