State Of Nature Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The state of nature is a condition without government, generally used in social contract theory to justify political authority. The device assumed greatest importance in the works of the great contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it has a long history, both before and after that period. Descriptions of man’s purported natural condition differ in important ways (e.g., on whether circumstances were peaceful or ridden with conflict). Such variations are used to justify different moral and political conclusions.

Mythical accounts of a prepolitical (and presocial) Golden Age are common in ancient Greek and Latin literature; e.g., in Plato’s Protagoras (c. 390–380 BCE) and Cicero’s On Invention (84 BCE). Classical arguments blended well with Judaeo Christian accounts of the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall to support the medieval notion that the state arose as a remedy for sin.

During the late medieval and early modern periods, claims that political power originated from a prepolitical, natural condition generally supported limitations on political power. Thomas Hobbes was highly original in using a contract argument to establish absolute government. At the heart of Hobbes’s theory is a horrific picture of the state of nature as a “war of all against all.” To escape such horrors, people would consent to absolute political authority. Although Hobbes employed the state of nature for largely analytical purposes, he also believed in its historical accuracy. Evidence is provided by “savage people” in America, whom Hobbes viewed as living in a “brutish manner,” and conflict between states in the international arena. Hobbes’s view of international relations taking place in a state of nature has been enormously influential in international relations theory.

In the state of nature described by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), people live under the law of nature, which, in the absence of government, they enforce themselves. People also possess property rights, use money, and have something of a developed economy. Locke’s view that rights, including property rights, exist in the state of nature was central to the development of subsequent theories of rights. When conflict breaks out in the state of nature, people recognize the need for impartial authority and move from the state of nature in two stages, forming first a community and then government. When government violates the agreement according to which it was established, people are justified in rising in revolution.

Influenced by anthropological and zoological discoveries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) depicts natural man as little different than an ape: solitary, with limited reasoning capacity, but also content and morally innocent. Man becomes corrupt only through a gradual process of moving into society, and the contract through which government originates is a clever fraud perpetrated by the rich upon the poor. Rousseau’s political theory aspires to recapture as much primordial natural purity as possible through the new social contract described in The Social Contract (1762).

By the end of the eighteenth century, the social contract and, along with it, the state of nature were widely criticized on historical grounds. But contract theory was revived by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls argues that appropriate principles of justice are those that would be agreed upon under fair conditions. The state of nature reappears in his theory as the original position. To prevent people from choosing principles that would advantage themselves, they are placed behind a veil of ignorance and so deprived of knowledge of their personal attributes, such as age, religion, race, or wealth. With Rawls and other recent thinkers who argue along similar lines, the state of nature (original position) loses all historical pretense. It is solely an analytical device to help identify appropriate moral principles.

Bibliography:

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Locke, John. “Second Treatise of Government.” In Two Treatises of Government, Edited by Peter Laslett,265–428. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Basic Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Edited by Peter Gay. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.

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