What is the state of nature?

Thomas Hobbes, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Thomas Hobbes answers

The state of nature is any condition in which there is no effective government to impose order.¹ Mark that carefully: it is not a claim about prehistory, not a portrait of primitive savages in some remote jungle, not a merely theoretical possibility conjured for the pleasure of speculation. It is the condition that obtains wherever civil authority breaks down — and it has broken down within living memory, as England itself demonstrated in the 1640s.²

In that condition, men live in a war of all against all.³ But here too precision is required, lest the rhetoric outrun the argument. War does not mean the constant actual use of force; it means a known disposition to use force, with no assurance to the contrary.⁴ Nor does "all against all" require that every man attacks every other man at every moment — even in the state of nature, men may join forces for temporary purposes.⁵

What it requires is only that a significant minority be troublesome enough, predatory enough, that no man can rest secure.¹ The rest follows from that: where no common power stands over men, each must treat every other as a potential enemy, and the posture of readiness for war is itself the war. The consequences are these: nothing in that condition can be unjust, for justice and injustice are qualities that relate to men in society, and where there is no common power there is no law, and where no law, no injustice.⁶

There is no property, no dominion, no mine and thine — only what each man can seize and hold by force or fraud, those being the two cardinal virtues of war.⁶ Yet the condition carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution. The passions that incline men to peace — fear of death, desire of the things necessary to commodious living, hope of obtaining them by industry — are real, and reason suggests the articles upon which agreement may be built.⁷

Out of that misery, men want to escape; and they can escape only by entering into agreements, ceding the right to all things, and constituting a common power to hold them to their covenants.⁸ That is the whole argument of the political philosophy in brief: the state of nature is the demonstration of why sovereignty is not merely convenient but necessary.

Sovereign princes, it should be noted, remain in precisely this condition toward one another — their forts, garrisons, and guns pointed at their neighbors' frontiers, their spies perpetually at work — and no one finds this scandalous, because the industry of their subjects is not thereby destroyed.⁹ The state of nature among sovereigns is the standing proof that the argument is not fanciful: it describes the actual posture of every independent power toward every other.

Sources

1. But if his analysis of the human condition requires, not that all (or most) people are dominators, but only that a significant minority are, a minority large enough to be troublesome, then Hobbes' account of human nature does not seem that unrealistic.

   Leviathan, p. 23

2. In the 1640s, when Hobbes was working on Leviathan in the relative safety of Paris, England (to the extent that it lacked an effective government) was for him a very painful example. A state of nature is one into which any civil society will lapse if government breaks down.

   Leviathan, p. 23

3. the condition of men outside civil society (the condition one may call the state of nature) is no other than a war of all men against all men; and in that war all men have right to all things.

   On the Citizen, p. 60

4. Hobbes will count it as war if there is a 'known disposition' to use force and no assurance that it will not be used.

   Leviathan, pp. 23–24

5. 'of all against all' does not necessarily mean 'of every person against every other person all of the time.' Hobbes does allow that even in the state of nature it will be possible for people to join forces for some temporary purpose.

   Leviathan, pp. 23–24

6. nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

   Leviathan, p. 160

7. The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.

   Leviathan, p. 160

8. all men, by necessity of their nature, want to get out of that miserable and hateful state, as soon as they recognize its misery. But they can only do so by entering into agreements to give up their right to all things.

   On the Citizen, p. 60

9. in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another...which is a posture of war. But because they uphold thereby the industry of their subjects, there does not follow from it that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men.

   Leviathan, p. 160