Strip away the police, the courts, the government, and every law you have ever known. What remains? For Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English philosopher writing during the chaos of the English Civil War, the answer was deeply unsettling. He imagined a condition he called the state of nature: a world before political authority, where human beings live without any common power to keep them in check. Far from being a peaceful paradise, Hobbes argued this condition would collapse into perpetual conflict. Understanding why he reached this bleak conclusion is the key to unlocking his entire social contract theory, one of the most influential ideas in modern political philosophy.
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What is the state of nature?
The state of nature is a thought experiment. It describes a hypothetical condition that exists before, or in the absence of, organised society and government. Hobbes used it not as a historical claim about how humans once lived, but as a logical device to answer a fundamental question: why do we need a state at all? By imagining what life would be like without political authority, he could justify why rational people would choose to create and submit to one.
Hobbes developed this idea most fully in his masterwork, Leviathan, published in 1651. The relevant discussion appears in Chapter 13, titled “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery.” His conclusion is famous: in the state of nature, there is no government, no law, and no shared authority, and so there is nothing to restrain human beings from acting on their worst impulses.
Hobbes’ view of human nature
To understand why Hobbes was so pessimistic, you first have to understand his theory of human nature. Hobbes lived during the Scientific Revolution, and he was deeply influenced by the idea that the universe operates according to fixed laws of motion. He tried to build a theory of human beings on the same mechanistic foundation, treating people as physical bodies driven by predictable forces rather than by divine purpose or natural virtue.
Appetites and aversions
For Hobbes, all human behaviour can be reduced to two basic drives: appetites and aversions. An appetite is a movement towards something a person desires, while an aversion is a movement away from something they dislike or fear. According to Hobbes’ account, every human passion, from ambition and curiosity to anger and love, ultimately arises from some combination of these two motions.
This view has a striking consequence. Hobbes argued that there is no absolute or objective “good.” Instead, people simply call “good” whatever satisfies their appetites and “evil” whatever they fear or hate. There is no common standard above individual desire. This makes human beings fundamentally self-interested, oriented towards self-preservation and the satisfaction of their own wants rather than towards cooperation or altruism. Scholars often label this position psychological egoism, though there is genuine debate among interpreters about how strictly Hobbes held it.
Natural equality
One of Hobbes’ most important and counterintuitive claims is that human beings are roughly equal by nature. He did not mean equal in moral worth in the modern sense. He meant equal in their capacity to harm one another. Even the physically weakest person, Hobbes pointed out, is capable of killing the strongest, whether by cunning, by deception, or by joining forces with others. As he put it in Chapter 13, the difference between one person and another is not so great that anyone can claim a benefit they could safely keep for themselves.
This equality is the hidden engine of conflict. Because no one is strong enough to dominate everyone else permanently, and because resources are scarce, equality breeds insecurity rather than harmony.
The three causes of conflict
From this equality of ability arises an equality of hope: everyone expects to be able to achieve their goals. But when two people desire the same thing that they cannot both have, they become enemies. Building on this, Hobbes identified three principal causes of quarrel embedded in human nature. He summarised them as competition, diffidence, and glory.
Competition
Competition is the most straightforward cause. People need food, shelter, and other goods to survive, and these resources are limited. When supply is scarce and demand is shared, conflict becomes likely. Hobbes said competition makes people “invade for gain,” using violence to make themselves masters of other people’s possessions, land, and even their families. This is conflict driven by the desire for material advantage.
Diffidence
Diffidence means distrust or fear. This is perhaps the most psychologically interesting cause. In a world with no authority to guarantee your safety, you cannot trust that your neighbour will not attack you tomorrow. The most rational response, Hobbes argued, is anticipation: striking first to neutralise a potential threat before it can harm you. If you fear an attack, the safest move is to attack pre-emptively. The tragedy is that everyone reasons this way, so mutual fear produces the very violence each person was trying to avoid. Diffidence makes people “invade for safety.”
Glory
Glory is the desire for reputation and recognition. Hobbes observed that humans crave respect and resent any sign of being undervalued. People will fight over “trifles,” he wrote, such as a word, a smile, a different opinion, or any perceived slight against themselves, their family, their profession, or their nation. This cause of conflict has nothing to do with survival or material need. It is about status and honour, and it shows how easily violence can erupt even when nothing tangible is at stake.
The war of all against all
When these three causes operate without any common power to restrain them, the result is what Hobbes called the “war of every man against every man”, or in its Latin form, bellum omnium contra omnes. This is the defining feature of the state of nature.
Importantly, Hobbes did not mean that people are fighting all the time. He clarified that war does not consist only in battle or the act of fighting. It consists in a known disposition to fight, a period of time in which the willingness to resort to violence is constant and understood by all. Just as bad weather is not a single rain shower but a general tendency over many days, war in the state of nature is a persistent condition of insecurity, even during moments of apparent calm.
In such a condition, Hobbes argued, notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, simply do not exist. Where there is no common power, there is no law; and where there is no law, there can be no injustice. Force and fraud become the two cardinal virtues, because nothing is forbidden. Morality, in his view, is not natural to humans but is a product of agreement and authority, which the state of nature lacks entirely.
Why life would be “nasty, brutish, and short”
Hobbes captured the consequences of this condition in his single most quoted passage. In the state of nature, he wrote, there is no place for industry, agriculture, navigation, building, knowledge, arts, or society. And worst of all, there is “continual fear, and danger of violent death.” Life itself, he concluded, would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Each word in that phrase does real work. Life is solitary because constant distrust prevents lasting cooperation. It is poor because no one will invest labour in farming or building when others can simply seize the fruits of that work. It is nasty and brutish because violence is ever-present and there is no shared culture or civilisation. And it is short because the threat of sudden, violent death hangs over everyone at every moment. No progress, no security, and no peace are possible.
From the state of nature to the social contract
This grim picture is not where Hobbes wants to leave us. The entire purpose of describing the state of nature so vividly is to demonstrate the necessity of escaping it. Here Hobbes introduces the laws of nature, which are not commands from above but principles that reason discovers in the interest of self-preservation. The first law of nature is that every person ought to seek peace as far as they can hope to obtain it, and only when peace is impossible may they fall back on the advantages of war.
Reason therefore tells human beings that the way out of perpetual fear is to give up their unlimited natural right to do whatever they please. They do this by entering into a social contract: an agreement among individuals to surrender their right to self-government and transfer it to a single, powerful authority. Hobbes called this authority the Leviathan, named after the biblical sea monster, to convey its overwhelming power.
For Hobbes, this sovereign authority must be absolute. Only a power great enough to keep everyone “in awe” can enforce the contract, deter violence, and make peace possible. In exchange for surrendering some freedom, individuals gain security, stability, and the conditions in which industry, commerce, and culture can finally flourish. The bleakness of the state of nature is, in the end, the strongest argument Hobbes could make for the necessity of strong government.
What do you think? Is Hobbes right that without a powerful authority, human beings would inevitably descend into a “war of all against all,” or does his theory underestimate our natural capacity for cooperation and trust? And in a modern democracy, how much individual freedom should we be willing to surrender to a sovereign authority in exchange for security and order?
References
- https://iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
- https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-hobbes/leviathan/text/chapter-13
- https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/leviathan/section3/
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-of-nature-political-theory
- https://philolibrary.crc.nd.edu/article/the-state-of-nature/
- https://learn.saylor.org/mod/book/view.php?id=30594
- https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/introtophilosophy/chapter/7-3-1-social-contract-theory-hobbes-2/
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes-moral/
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