Lesson · 4 min Steady
The State of Nature
In one line Picture life with no shared rules or power, and see what rules give us.
Hobbes asked us to imagine people with no government, no laws and no common power to settle disputes: a state of nature. People there are about equal in strength and cunning, and each must protect what he has. So each has reason to fear the others and to strike first.
In such a state, Hobbes said, there is no room for farming, trade or art, since nothing is secure. Life is a constant contest. Agreeing to a shared power that enforces rules is a way out, one that everyone has reason to accept.
You need not accept his whole picture to use the thought experiment. It asks what rules are for. If you can say what you would lose without a rule, you can judge whether it is worth its price.
Go deeper
Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, after years of civil war in England, and the picture of constant fear reflects what he had seen. Locke later described a gentler state of nature in which people already have rights, and Rousseau thought the conflict came from society, not nature.
All three use the state of nature mainly to ask what rules are for, though Hobbes pointed to civil war and to peoples without a common power as cases of it.
The fence dispute
Two neighbors, Pia and Raj, argue over where their garden fence should stand. No rule, map or authority exists, and each is ready to move the fence in the night.
Both lose sleep, plant nothing near the line and watch each other. When the town adopts a survey and a small fee to settle disputes, they grumble at the fee. Then they plant their gardens.
Try this today Pick one rule you resent, and imagine the same day with no rule at all; write what you would lose.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “The State of Nature.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/the-state-of-nature. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy” — Covers the state of nature and why he thought people would accept a common power.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Project Gutenberg) — Chapter 13 describes the state of nature.