State of Nature

The state of nature refers to how human beings behave in the absence of a civil society. In other words, the state of nature describes how people interacted prior to the establishment of any government or other social institutions.

Claims about the state of nature and the quality of life experienced by humans who live in the state of nature vary considerably. Thomas Hobbes, for example, thought that people living in the state of nature were engulfed in a constant war of all against all and that life was brief and nearly unbearable. In contrast, John Locke held that the state of nature was the condition in which people had the most freedom, but he also claimed that the state of nature had a natural law to govern it, which mandated (among other things) that we do not unjustly harm one another. Additionally, David Hume challenged the notion of the state of nature by arguing that human beings are naturally social and that it is not possible to conceive of human beings existing prior to the establishment of a society.