State of Nature - Early History, Hobbes, Locke, And Rousseau, Contemporary Developments, Bibliography
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The state of nature is a situation without government, employed in social contract theory in order to justify political authority. The device is most important in the works of the great contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). But it has a long history and was used by many other theorists. In the latter half of the twentieth century, variants of the state of nature were revived by John Rawls and other theorists who attempted to establish particular moral or political principles on the grounds that they would be selected in artificially constructed choice situations.
Accounts of humanity's purported natural condition differ in important ways, for example, whether circumstances are peaceful or riddled with conflict, whether there is an absence of society as well as the state, and the extent to which the people depicted resemble those in existing societies. These variations and others lead to justifications of different forms of governments—and moral principles.
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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 fi…
During the late medieval and early modern periods, claims according to which political power originated from a pre-political, natural condition generally supported limitations on political power—which people would have required for renouncing their natural liberty. The great originality of Hobbes was to use a contract argument to establish absolute government. He accomplished this by depict…
By the end of the eighteenth century, the social contract was widely criticized on historical grounds. The idea fell into general disuse, and with it, the state of nature. Contract theory was revived by John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), although Rawls used his contract to justify moral principles rather than a form of government. Rawls's principles of justice are those that would b…
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