Hobbes’s state of nature is a thought experiment, and reading it as history weakens the argument

Javier Ferrandis Fellow

October 24, 2026 · 5 replies

Power & the state Modern European Social contract theory Thomas Hobbes #hobbes #leviathan #state-of-nature #thought-experiments

Its coordinates: 6.4 Political Philosophy · 6.4.3 Sovereignty and the State

Where it stands

For 2Against 3

Chapter 13 of Leviathan gives us the line everyone knows: without a common power to keep them in awe, the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Every few years someone announces that anthropology has refuted Hobbes, because early humans cooperated, shared food and cared for the sick. I think this misses the point.

My thesis: the state of nature is a thought experiment about what follows when people who are roughly equal, competitive and uncertain of each other have no common authority. Its force doesn't depend on its ever having happened. Hobbes himself writes that he believes it was never generally so over all the world. What he points to as evidence is the condition of rival sovereigns, always armed and watching each other "in the state and posture of gladiators."

Read as history, the argument is easy to refute and stands or falls on archaeology. Read as a model, it asks a harder question. I work in a cooperative bank, which lives on trust between members. I know exactly how fast that trust goes when rules become uncertain.

I'll concede one weakness at the start: in the same chapter Hobbes also mentions "the savage people in many places of America" as a living example. So he wanted it both ways.

For or against?

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

Khalid Mahmood Awan 3 days ago

For Fellow

For. The law runs on such fictions. For thirty-one years I watched courts ask what "the reasonable man" would have done. Nobody has met him. Nobody thinks the doctrine collapses when a survey shows real people are unreasonable. The fiction isolates one question so it can be answered. Hobbes's state of nature isolates the question of why we need authority at all.
Javier Ferrandis 3 days ago

For Fellow

Mateo, that's a fair charge against Hobbes the man, and I accept it. But it supports my side. The America passage is the weakest part of the chapter, precisely because it tries to turn a model into history. Strip it out and the argument about rival sovereigns still stands. Zainab's case, where small sovereigns appear at once, is close to what Hobbes himself would have predicted.

Against the thesis 3

Zainab Kadhim 3 days ago

Against Contributor

Against, from someone who lived in a city where the common power disappeared for a while. What I saw was not Hobbes's war of all against all, and not its opposite either. Neighbours organised. Militias organised. People were afraid of both.

That matters for the argument. If you treat the state of nature as a model, you still need the model to predict roughly what happens. Hobbes's model predicts that without a sovereign everything falls apart. In my experience new small sovereigns appear at once. The history is not decoration; it tests the model.
Mateo Quispe 3 days ago

Against Fellow

Against, and on the point you conceded. When Hobbes needs an example of the state of nature, he reaches for Indigenous Americans. That's not an innocent illustration. In the seventeenth century it helped present the peoples of the Americas as living outside any political order, which is to say outside any rights a European power had to respect.

A thought experiment that leans on that example is not neutral. You can't keep the model clean by forgetting what it was used for.
Youssef Berrada 3 days ago

Against Fellow

Against, with a historian's bias. Ibn Khaldun, writing his Muqaddimah in the 1370s, also asked what life is like before the state, and he answered from history: the desert peoples he knew. What he found was not isolated individuals in a war of all against all, but kin groups held together by ʿaṣabiyya, group feeling, which defended them better than any city wall. Royal authority, for him, grows out of that solidarity, not out of fear between strangers.

That is why I think reading Hobbes as history matters. His model starts from individuals who are roughly equal and alone. History never offers us those people. It offers families, tribes, guilds and banks like Javier's. A thought experiment may choose its starting point freely, but if the starting point never occurs, the conclusion about what we need may be wrong too.