Hobbes and Rousseau's state of nature.
Humans have been around for about 250,000 years and we have been civilised for less than 4% of this. Ideas surrounding the fundamental nature of people have been used in philosophy to theorise about what the other 96% could have been like. Hobbes (1651) argues that people are intrinsically selfish whereas Rousseau (1762) thought that people also have a capacity for empathy and compassion, brought upon mainly from an aversion to pain.
Hobbes argued that before society developed there was a war of "every man against every man" (Hobbes, 1651, pp.97). The main reason for this war is that people would live in fear of being attacked and so would always have to be ready to defend themselves. In fact he defines the state of war not as a state of continual fighting but as a state or constant readiness to fight.
Hobbes felt that people would be fighting in competition because of scarcity, influenced by Galileo and the law of conservation of energy he believed that people would never be satisfied. Hobbes thought people would fight for glory and as a form of self defence, since a reputation is an easy way to avoid being the victim of a pre-emptive attack. This is based on the assumption that people have foresight and that they will recognise and see each other regularly enough for this to take effect. Hobbes also assumes people will fear death, something that Rousseau denied.
Hobbes believed in the Rights of Nature, which state that you are at liberty to use all of your power to preserve your own life. Hobbes defines the Right of Nature to mean that everyman has a right to everything, even to one another's bodies. The Law of Nature states that you are obliged not to do anything destructive to your own life or to remove the means to preserve it. Finally the fundamental Law of Nature states that everyone must endeavour to seek peace as long as there is hope of attaining it, however if there is no hope then you may use "all…advantages of Warre" (Ibid, pp.99). It would be better for us to obtain peace but it is individually rational to be at war. This is why a Sovereign is needed to force people to obey the Law of Nature, only in doing this can people be happy and so Hobbes believes there is a need for a strong dictator to take power in order for people to become civilised.
Rousseau (1762) paints a very different picture of what life was like before the state, he believed that people would not have the foresight to want anything but to fulfil their immediate needs. The world would be so sparsely populated people would "perhaps hardly meet twice in their lives, without recognising or speaking to one another". Children would not even recognise their own mother once they were old enough to fend for themselves. For Rousseau there is no need for reputation, people would have no vanity or ego, they would live in isolation, in a different place almost every night, they would have no roots and no one to remember them.
Rousseau assumes 'savage man' will have no language or industry, "every art would perish with the inventor". There would be no education and no progress and "centuries rolled on as undeveloped as the first ages". Rousseau counters Hobbes argument that the strong would oppress the weak in this condition by saying that there would be no way to oppress before the concept of property.
Hobbes thinks that a life with no "culture…navigation…building… knowledge of the face of the Earth…account of time…arts…letters" or "society" (Ibid, pp.95) would lead to a life which is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Ibid, pp.96). Rousseau disagrees because he thinks that there would be no concept of justice or feelings of injustice; "it is pity which in the state of nature takes the place of laws". He thinks that this is better since "no one is tempted to disobey", Rousseau argues that there is more equality among savages "where everyone eats the same foods" and "lives in the same style…how much less the difference between man and man must be in the state of nature than it is in society".
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