The State of Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau - Two views on Liberty

Both Thomas Hobbes and Jean-JacquesRousseau are considered contractualists, that is, they understand that society is a rational creation of man and that, therefore, there was a moment before society until the point that it was later created. This moment is called the state of nature. The state of nature is, as already stated, a moment before civil society, prior to the creation of the state (political entity), in which man lived in the fullness of his nature. The nature of man, however, is a point of divergence among contractual theorists. When we approach Hobbes and Rousseau, one of the elements that distances them the most is the notion of human nature. This disagreement is crucial to understand how the later reasoning of both led them to really different steps.

The investigation of the state of nature has in it’s character a mythological atmosphere in it’s form of explanation of the world. The conclusions and precepts depart from pure imaginative and deductive exercise, for there is, in fact, no capacity to have an empirical demarcation of the state of nature stricto sensu, but only a deductive belief of its existence. An interesting point to note is how the notion of the state of nature can be similar to the analysis of “the fall” of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. The notion that there was a certain nature and that a given…