State of Nature

Mythical accounts of a pre-social and/or pre-political Golden Age abound in classical literature. Familiar variants are found in Hesiod's Works and Days (lines 108–21) and in Plato's Statesman. In Plato's Protagoras, the title character describes the original human condition as one of isolation and peril from wild beasts and the elements. Divine intervention provided fire and the crafts, which allowed humans to defend themselves, and moral qualities of justice and respect, which allowed them to live together peaceably. A roughly similar account was presented by Cicero, in De inventione (On invention, I.2.2), and an especially vivid account in Book V of Lucretius' De rerum natura (On the nature of things). A variant of these themes is that people originally enjoyed a condition of peace and plenty, until some intervening event gave rise to conflict, which made the state necessary. The Stoic Posidonius attributed humankind's fall to the origin of property (Seneca, Epistle 90), while according to Ovid, the change occurred as people began to eat meat (Metamorphoses, XV.96–111).

Connections between an original condition and the origin of justices are presented in Book II of Plato's Republic. Plato's spokesman, Glaucon, argues that justice arose from a general compromise: people agreed not to take advantage of others, in exchange for not being taken advantage of themselves (358e–59b). This was perhaps the first "social contract" argument in the Western tradition.

Classical arguments blended well with Judaeo-Christian accounts of the Garden of Eden and subsequent fall, to support the important medieval notion that the state arose as a remedy for sin. But other theorists, influenced by Aristotle, argued against the state of nature and contract traditions, claiming that the human is naturally a political animal, and so there could not have been a primordial pre-social (or pre-political) condition. St. Thomas Aquinas and subsequent Scholastic theorists argued that even in the Garden of Eden, authority was necessary to coordinate people's activity to achieve the common good.