Questions: The State of Nature

Question 1

Hobbes argues for near-absolute sovereign power. A critic objects that this requires assuming humans are naturally cruel and violent. How should a Hobbesian respond?

• A. The critic is right — Hobbes does assume humans are naturally vicious, and this is the weakest part of his argument
• B. Hobbes's argument does not require human cruelty — even rational, self-preserving people reach a war of all against all because equality generates competition, competition generates diffidence, and no one can safely cooperate without enforcement
• C. Hobbes assumes humans are naturally cooperative but argues that civilization corrupts them, requiring sovereign authority to restore order
• D. The need for sovereignty follows only from humans' natural desire for glory and dominance, which Hobbes considers an ineradicable vice

Answer: (B)

Hobbes's argument is nearly game-theoretic, not a claim about moral depravity. The war of all against all emerges from rational self-interest under rough equality: since anyone can be killed by a sufficiently cunning coalition, preemptive action is rational, making everyone worse off. Even people with peaceful intentions reach this equilibrium if they cannot trust others. Option A misreads Hobbes. Option C describes Rousseau's diagnosis. Option D is partially present in Hobbes (glory-seeking is one cause) but not the foundation of the argument — the logic works even without it.

Question 2

Locke argues for a limited government with a right of revolution if it overreaches. This conclusion follows most directly from his claim that:

• A. The state of nature is so violent that people will accept any government to escape it
• B. Natural rights to life, liberty, and property pre-exist political society and constrain what legitimate government may do
• C. Governments derive their authority from tradition and custom, not from the consent of the governed
• D. The absence of property in the state of nature means individuals have nothing to protect and therefore no basis for rights claims

Answer: (B)

Locke's key move is that natural law already governs the state of nature, grounding natural rights before any government exists. Government is created to protect those pre-political rights through impartial adjudication. If government violates the rights it was created to protect, it dissolves the social contract — the right of revolution follows directly. Option A describes Hobbes's logic, which leads to opposite conclusions about sovereign power. Option C is Burke's traditionalism, not Locke. Option D contradicts Locke, for whom property rights arise from labor in the state of nature, prior to political society.

Question 3

The state of nature is a normative thought experiment rather than a historical account of how early humans actually lived.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all use the state of nature as a philosophical device — a way to isolate what political institutions provide and what values are at stake — not as anthropological description of prehistory. The purpose is normative: to establish a baseline for evaluating political authority and citizens' obligations. Hobbes never claimed that prehistoric humans literally lived in a war of all against all. He used the thought experiment to show what rational agents would accept when stripped of political institutions.

Question 4

Rousseau argues that humans in the state of nature are peaceful because they are guided by natural reason and natural law, which is why he believes we should look to that condition for political guidance.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This conflates Locke's account with Rousseau's. Rousseau's natural human is pre-rational and pre-social — peaceful not because of reason or natural law but because the social conditions for conflict barely arise. Rousseau emphatically does not think we can or should return to the state of nature; that would be 'absurd, like trying to unlearn language.' His project in The Social Contract is to design political institutions that preserve freedom within civilized society — not to recover natural innocence. The natural law governing pre-political life is Locke's picture.

Question 5

How does one's view of the state of nature determine what political institutions one endorses? Use the contrast between Hobbes and Locke to illustrate.

Model answer: Hobbes's state of nature is a self-reinforcing catastrophe that only absolute sovereign power can dissolve — any limitation on the sovereign recreates the original dilemma. Locke's state of nature already has natural law and rights in place; the only problem is the absence of impartial adjudication. This narrower diagnosis justifies only a limited government whose mandate is to protect pre-existing rights, and which forfeits authority if it violates them. The anthropological premise drives the political conclusion.

The thought experiment's power is that it forces articulation of what political authority is supposed to provide. If you start from Hobbes's baseline (security is everything, any order beats the alternative), you tend toward strong central authority. If you start from Locke's baseline (rights pre-exist government), you tend toward constitutionalism and limits on state power. Contemporary political disagreements often trace, at root, to competing intuitions about this baseline — which is why understanding the thought experiment is prerequisite to understanding the tradition.