State of Nature

The state of nature is a thought experiment in early modern political philosophy: the condition human beings would be in if there were no political authority. Early-modern social-contract theorists used the device to derive the rational basis and proper limits of government from features of human nature itself.

Thomas Hobbes's state of nature (Leviathan, 1651) is a war of all against all — a condition in which life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and the rational solution is the surrender of nearly all rights to an absolute sovereign. John Locke's state of nature (Second Treatise, 1689) is more peaceful: human beings are equal and free under the natural law, and they form government chiefly to remedy the inconveniences of unenforced rights. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's state of nature (Discourse on Inequality, 1755) is more peaceful still — a condition of self-sufficient natural goodness corrupted only by the introduction of property and social comparison. Each theorist's state of nature does the same argumentative work: it secures whichever political conclusion the theorist wants the contract to produce.

The state of nature is a thought experiment, not a historical claim. Hobbes is explicit: the natural condition of mankind is what we would be reduced to if government collapsed, not necessarily a phase of historical development. Locke leaves the question of historical instantiation more open, citing examples from the Americas. Rousseau treats his state of nature as deliberately hypothetical — a condition to be reasoned about, not a past to be recovered.

Feminist and post-colonial critics have noted that the contractarian state of nature is constructed around the figure of the propertied adult male and that women, children, dependents, and colonized peoples are typically absent from it as parties to the contract. Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract argues that the social contract is preceded by a sexual contract that subordinates women. Charles Mills's The Racial Contract argues that European political theory rests on a tacit contract that constitutes non-Europeans as outside the political community. The state-of-nature device, on these readings, secures more than it advertises.