Chs. 13-14 of Leviathan contain Hobbes' famous account of the state of nature, the state in which people without a sovereign live:

1. Humans are by nature equal in physical and mental powers because even the weakest can kill the strongest by secret machination or confederacy with others.

2. From equality of ability, arises equality of hope in satisfying one's desires.

3. Given scarcity, equal hope generates competition, and ultimately enmity among those who want the same thing but cannot have it.

4. This produces generalized diffidence. In such a situation:

· anticipation (augmenting one's power by mastering others) seems most reasonable even for peaceful men, especially because

o some others enjoy glory

o in order to maintain one's present power, one must expand it.

· nothing is unjust or wrong because these presuppose a common law, and hence the common power which is, by hypothesis, missing

5. This amounts to a state of war of everyone against everyone, i.e. a situation in which everyone is disposed to fight against everyone else.

6. The result is a miserable life without security, culture, commodious living: a life which is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

7. Since everyone has the basic right of nature to use one's own power as one sees fit to preserve one's life, and the state of nature is one of war, in the state of nature one has a right to everything, including other people's bodies (presumably, because one may decide that anything is needed for one's preservation).

NOTES:

Hb adopts a form of radical individualism:

· by assuming that certain basic human characteristics (including self-consciousness, language, and self-interest) are independent of societal links. This is why, in resolving society into its constituents, he finds individuals, and not parents, or children, or husbands and wives.

· by claiming that humans do not seek society by nature per se, but in order to profit from it; in other words, society for Hb has only instrumental value.

NOTE: Both assumptions have been challenged both in Hb's times (e.g., Cudworth, Bramhall) and later. Hb's idea of a natural equality breaks with the Aristotelian and Medieval tradition of a state of natural inequality among humans (natural masters/natural slaves, men/women, enlightened/uneligthened). Moreover, the fact that he infers a lack of natural political subordination from equality seems to indicate that he conceived of the former as a subordination to other people, not to the law.

Some, e.g., Pufendorf, have argued that from equality in the state of nature, not a state of war, but one of peace would follow because only fools would quarrel with others of equal strength. However, Hb might reply that there are many fools and that scarcity may push people to fight anyway

Hb's position on the ontological status of the state of nature is unclear. Although he denies that it ever existed all over the world at the same time, he also claim that

· American "savages" live in such a state

· we do live such a state as soon as authority is absent or even sufficiently weakened (locking of doors, chests, etc.) (ch. 13)

· the various countries in the world are, in effect, in a state of nature (Why this last case is relevant is unclear)