Questions: State of Nature and Its Philosophical Role

Question 1

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all invoke the state of nature but reach radically different political conclusions. What best explains why the same argumentative device produces such different outcomes?

• A. They are describing different historical periods — Hobbes writes about early prehistory, Locke about agrarian societies, Rousseau about hunter-gatherers
• B. Their states of nature embed different assumptions about human nature, and those assumptions determine what government must provide and what limits its authority
• C. They use incompatible logical structures: Hobbes uses deduction, Locke uses natural law, Rousseau uses empirical observation from indigenous societies
• D. The differences are primarily rhetorical — all three agree on the fundamental grounds for political authority

Answer: (B)

The state of nature is a thought experiment, not a historical description, so option A is wrong. Each philosopher's picture embeds a different model of human nature. Hobbes's self-interested competitors in a war of all against all license absolute sovereignty — anything is better than that baseline. Locke's rational agents already bound by natural law with pre-existing rights limit sovereign authority and permit revolution. Rousseau's naturally peaceful beings corrupted by society point toward institutional redesign rather than mere justification of authority. The philosophical work is done by the assumptions baked into the baseline.

Question 2

Locke argues that government loses legitimacy when it systematically violates natural rights, licensing resistance. Hobbes explicitly denies this. What feature of their states of nature explains this disagreement?

• A. Locke posits natural law that pre-exists government, so rights exist independently and government can violate them; Hobbes denies that pre-political rights exist at all
• B. Locke's state of nature is more violent than Hobbes's, giving individuals stronger reason to resist tyranny
• C. Both accept the same picture of the state of nature but draw different logical inferences from it
• D. Hobbes was a royalist writing in defense of a specific king, making his argument situationally motivated rather than philosophically principled

Answer: (A)

For Locke, natural law governs the state of nature — people already have rights to life, liberty, and property before government is formed. Government is created to better protect these pre-existing rights and loses legitimacy when it violates them. For Hobbes, there are no rights in the state of nature (only the 'right of nature' to do whatever survival requires) — rights are created by sovereign authority. A sovereign cannot violate rights it created; revolution only threatens to return everyone to the far worse war of all against all. The difference in political conclusions follows directly from whether rights are pre-political (Locke) or politically constituted (Hobbes).

Question 3

The state of nature, as used by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, is intended as a historical account of how pre-political human societies actually lived before civilization emerged.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

All three thinkers use the state of nature as a thought experiment or hypothetical justificatory device, not as anthropological history. Its purpose is to strip away contingent features of existing arrangements to ask: what would rational people create from scratch, and what does that tell us about the grounds and limits of authority? Hobbes explicitly acknowledges that no such period of universal war may have existed across all of humanity. Treating the state of nature as an empirical claim would make these arguments trivially refutable by archaeological evidence — that is not how they are meant to function.

Question 4

Rousseau's political project, unlike Hobbes's, cannot be understood as justifying submission to existing sovereign authority — because Rousseau's state of nature pictures humanity as originally free and society itself as the source of corruption.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Hobbes uses a frightening state of nature (the war of all against all) to make virtually any stable sovereign look like an improvement — the project is conservative, licensing submission. Rousseau's peaceful pre-social human makes existing civilization look like the problem. Since property and social comparison introduced inequality and domination, the political project is not to justify authority but to redesign institutions that might restore natural freedom and equality. The state of nature picture does not merely describe a different starting point — it licenses an entirely different political program.

Question 5

Explain the philosophical purpose of the 'state of nature' concept. Why do political philosophers use this hypothetical rather than simply analyzing existing societies to understand the basis of political authority?

Model answer: The state of nature is a device for identifying the rationale behind political authority by imagining what conditions looked like before government existed. If you want to explain why authority is legitimate — and what limits it — you need a baseline to compare against. Analyzing existing societies doesn't help because they already contain authority, making it circular to ask why authority is justified. By imagining people without government and asking what they would rationally create, philosophers identify what government must provide (the defects of the state of nature that need solving) and what limits its power (the rights or freedoms people would not surrender to any sovereign).

The state of nature's power and danger lie in the fact that changing the assumptions embedded in the baseline changes everything downstream: what government is for, how much power it gets, whether resistance is legitimate. This is why the seemingly academic disagreement between Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau about a fictional pre-political condition has such far-reaching political implications — the picture of human nature without institutions does the philosophical heavy lifting.