State of Nature (status naturalis) — A hypothetical condition of human beings prior to, or apart from, any political authority and any established legal order, used in modern political philosophy as a thought experiment to justify (or to question) the existence of the state. As a rule it is not a historical account but an analytical device: one asks what would remain to individuals if common power were removed, and from the answer the legitimacy of government is derived. In Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651, ch. 13), natural equality of ability breeds rivalry, distrust, and the pursuit of glory, producing a war “of every man against every man” in which life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; only a sovereign able to enforce peace allows escape from this condition. In Locke (Second Treatise of Government, 1689, ch. 2), the state of nature is one of freedom and equality governed by a law of nature accessible to reason, with rights to life, liberty, and possessions; its “inconveniences,” above all the lack of an impartial judge, motivate civil government. In Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 1755), the state of nature is a conjectural reconstruction rather than a historical fact, in which human beings, moved by self-love and pity, know neither property nor institutionalized inequality. The three versions lead in different ways to the idea of the social contract. See also Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and natural law.
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