Introduction

Summary

Abstract: The state of nature is a foundational concept for modern Western thought, influencing ideas about colonialism, secularization, and ecology. It is a fractured idea that shines a light on the contemporary culture wars, and continues to shape debates on human nature, political structures, and the legacy of the West.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. […] Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. […] There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

We are no angels. But at least we have remorse.

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

If modern Western society is the solution, whatever could have been the problem? Or, more pointedly, what would the West like to imagine was the problem? Answers to questions like these are often offered in the form of stories, and those stories are as far-reaching as they are self-serving. They are far-reaching because they shape how societies understand themselves, and how they relate to other cultures and to the natural world, setting the bounds of what they can hope for and what they must fear. They are self-serving because the stories societies tell themselves about the triumphs they have won and the trials they have overcome serve to justify their legitimacy and, yes, very often their supposed superiority. In the ancient world, these legitimating stories told of lands providentially conquered and prophecies miraculously fulfilled, of cities founded by heroes and nations descended from gods. Western modernity may have stripped away the deities and bloodletting, but it retains in its own stories the ancient sense of destiny and blessing.

This is a book about a powerful idea. It is an idea at the heart of the stories the modern West tells about itself, stories that shape the fragmented and sometimes contradictory ways it imagines its own purpose and destiny. It is an idea that informs complex modern convictions about human nature, coloniality, secularity, and ecology, as well as the West’s clashing foundational commitments to equality and accumulation, freedom and property, universality and the individual. It is a remarkably versatile idea that has been used to justify everything from eugenics to egalitarianism, subjugation to emancipation, bourgeois to revolutionary creeds.

That idea is the state of nature. Its main entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is disarmingly brief: “The condition in which human beings exist, or are imagined to exist, in the absence of laws or regulatory social structures.” Nevertheless, despite the conciseness of this demure description, few other single ideas can encompass and make sense of so many notions foundational to the modern West’s self-understanding.¹ The state of nature is a singularly potent and pervasive idea. Only it is not an idea. It is a motley collection of plural, contrasting, fractured, and largely incompatible ideas. The modern West conjures with multiple states of nature that inform irreconcilably diverse convictions about human origins, human nature, and human aspirations. The Hobbesian story of a war of all against all and a life that is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short”² seems, after all, remarkably different from Rousseau’s characterization of one moment in the state of nature as “the genuine youth of the World,” since which time “all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species.”³ Both Hobbes and Rousseau, furthermore, are different again from the Lockean picture of a property-owning state of nature beset not with a war of all against all but with certain “inconveniences.”⁴

The state of nature is fractured in a way it is impossible to reassemble into a smooth, coherent whole, and, as we shall see in this book, this fragmentation is the source of much of its fascination, controversy, and explanatory power. The irreducibly fractured state of nature also reflects and crystallizes a fundamental fracture within Western modernity itself, captured in Charles Taylor’s notion of “cross-pressured” existence (Taylor 2006, 727), where individuals are constantly confronted with positions and assumptions very different to their own, reminding them that their commitments are neither universal nor immune to critique. For Taylor, this fragmentation only increases with what he calls the “nova effect” of a “steadily widening gamut of new positions […] which have become available options for us” (423). Modernity’s project – its desire to unify, systematize, and rationalize – has always been haunted by its opposite: a fracturing and a fragmentation that resist any final synthesis. The plural state of nature, with its conflicting narratives and irreconcilable assumptions, stands as a testament to, and a participation in, this modern fragmentation. It is a continuing challenge to any simplistic vision of a coherent “modern mind,” or of a non-contradictory West.

Through the fragmented, kaleidoscopic lens of the state of nature, in these chapters I will tell the story of some of the most important commitments, assumptions, and developments of the modern Western world.⁵ I will examine how the state of nature arose, what it is, how it functions ideologically, and how, despite almost no one literally believing it any more, it continues to make sense of how the West makes sense. I will argue that the state of nature does not merely describe but actively participates in making possible the idea and the reality of the modern Western intellectual and geopolitical world, that it casts a fresh light on some of the West’s most important public debates, and that it provides a particularly powerful set of coordinates in terms of which to understand and evaluate the modern West in all its rhizomatic complexity.

Whose State of Nature? Which Modernity?

This book investigates the state of nature as it has been conceptualized within the Western intellectual tradition, particularly in the influential accounts given by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and how these accounts continue to shape modern Western imaginaries. While the concept of the state of nature has parallels in non-Western cultural contexts, the focus here is on its development within, and implications for, the modern West, where it has played a foundational role in shaping colonial, secular, and ecological discourses.⁶ Indeed, the state of nature finds itself at the heart of the contemporary Western culture wars. This fact correlates with – and is perhaps in part explained by – a growing sense of unease in some quarters with the identity, legacy, and legitimacy of the modern West, an unease eloquently expressed in the language of dethroned statues and decolonized syllabi.⁷ If the state of nature indeed functions as the founding myth of Western modernity (Bottici 2007, 151–176), if it is indeed “modernity’s key foundational narrative” (Smith 2002, 408) and a story that “helped create the modern world” (Mills and Pateman 2007, 55), then a reassessment of that world must also involve a renewed questioning of the state of nature itself.

Appeals to the state of nature in the contemporary culture wars can be divided into three groups: those who broadly align with Hobbes, those who appeal to Rousseau, and the anti-state of nature thinkers who reject both Hobbes and Rousseau.⁸ The appeals to Hobbes and Rousseau in these debates are almost universally of narrow compass, making rather selective reference to cherry-picked details of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s own accounts of the state of nature. Rather than characterizing these schools of political philosophy as “the children of Hobbes and the children of Rousseau” simpliciter (Lilla 2008, 217), it might be more helpful and accurate to call them nieces and nephews, or perhaps proponents of “Hobbes lite” and “Rousseau lite” versions of the state of nature.

Needless to say, much more is at stake in these contemporary culture war debates than setting straight the historical, anthropological, or archaeological record about human origins. Indeed, as Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall (2016, 225) argue, rival conceptions of the state of nature are ubiquitous, undercover ideas that exist “as an unnoticed part of the landscape of contemporary theory.” Rutger Bregman is only faintly exaggerating when he claims, “take just about any debate you can think of and it goes back, in some way, to the opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau,” adding that there is today “no other debate with stakes as high, or ramifications as far-reaching” as those over the state of nature (Bregman 2020, 44). The reason is as simple to articulate as it is complex to analyze: Contemporary discussions of the state of nature are, in fact, debates over – and at times even struggles for – the meaning, the legacy, and the future of Western modernity itself.

Hobbes Lite

The proponents of a “Hobbes lite” position focus on a bespoke selection of features of the Hobbesian state of nature, usually its agonism and uncertainty, while ignoring other aspects equally fundamental for Hobbes. Their main argument is often comparative rather than absolute: However wretched any state of nature may or may not have been, and however pleasant modern civil society may or may not prove, almost everybody – if not everybody without exception – is better off inside modern Western society than they could reasonably expect to be outside of it,⁹ and therefore modern society represents definitive progress over whatever preceded it. This conviction about the superiority of Western civil society has been called the “Hobbesian hypothesis” (Widerquist and McCall 2016), expressed in rather vivid terms by Locke in the contention that “a King of a large and fruitful Territory” in the Americas “feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England” (ST 297 [§42]).

The Hobbesian hypothesis is held, mutatis mutandis, by the great majority of classical social contract theorists including Locke and Pufendorf, and by other notable thinkers ranging from Adam Smith to Voltaire, including the Samuel Johnson who, reflecting on the pleasantness of a carriage ride, “heartily laughed at the ravings of those absurd visionaries who have attempted to persuade us of the superior advantages of a state of nature” (Boswell 1807, 381). The Hobbesian hypothesis is closely allied to the “Lockean proviso,” which makes it into an argument for nation building, taking the is of the Hobbesian hypothesis and turning it into a can, if not an ought: “[A]n institution (such as the state or the property rights system) can justly be imposed on people providing everyone living under its authority is better off than they could reasonably expect to be in a society without such authority” (Widerquist and McCall 2016, 4).¹⁰ If everyone is better off in civil society than outside it, then we ought to maintain such society where it exists, and perhaps even to impose it where it does not yet exist.¹¹

The claim of the Hobbesian hypothesis that the conditions of life in civil society are clearly better than those outside it is often hard to distinguish from a claim to a superiority of character or worth, as in Charles Darwin’s assertion that “[t]he western nations of Europe […] now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilisation” (Darwin 1981, 178),¹² or art historian and documentarist Kenneth Clark’s acid observation that “the student of European civilisation may observe that Polynesia produced no Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton or Goethe,” and that it collapsed like a house of cards upon “the peaceful appearance of a few British sailors followed by a handful of missionaries,” showing to Clarke’s satisfaction that Polynesian society was really no civilization at all (Clark 1969, 275).

No one bangs the twenty-first-century Hobbesian drum more loudly, or more frequently, than Steven Pinker. In The Blank Slate, he dismisses the “many intellectuals” who “have embraced the image of peaceable, egalitarian, and ecology-loving natives” (Pinker 2003, 56). Modern “data,” he argues, tells a different story: “In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong” (Pinker 2003, 95). If we believe that humans can be peaceable without democracy, he warns, then what has the modern West really achieved? In The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), he tells the story of “the chronic raiding and feuding that characterised life in a state of nature” (Pinker 2011, xxiv) and claims – in a strange twist on the doctrine of original sin – that “most of us […] are wired for violence” (Pinker 2011, 483–484), providing him with a somber backcloth of early human savagery against which the sparkling diamond of modern enlightened progress can glitter all the more brightly. Barely hidden under Pinker’s rhetoric is the sentiment of Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilizations, that “[t]he survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies” (Huntingdon 1996, 20–21).

Let us call the modern, expanded version of the Hobbesian hypothesis presented here the “Pinker postulate.” It has four main premises: (1) violence is high among early humans and progressively diminishes with the gains of reason and enlightenment; (2) rationality, democracy, equality, and freedom are “unnatural” fruits requiring conscious cultivation; (3) Western modernity has offered this bounty to the rest of the world in a spirit of magnanimous benevolence; and (4) these delicate fruits are currently under threat from an insidious latter-day Rousseauism manifest in contemporary society, particularly its education system.

Further adherents to one or more aspects of the Pinker postulate include archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, whom Pinker cites extensively in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Keeley seeks to debunk the “persistent and pernicious” myth of the peace-loving noble savage, arguing that “[i]n Western popular culture, Rousseau triumphs over Hobbes only when ‘man in a state of nature’ is no longer a viable competitor and has faded from direct sight” (Keeley 1996, 167–168). Writing fifteen years after Keeley, Azar Gat also takes a Hobbes lite approach: “Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong, about the great violence of the human state of nature” (Gat 2012, 150). With a little more rhetorical flourish, E. O. Wilson warns that we are all under the “Paleolithic curse” of being “addicted to tribal conflict” (Wilson 2014, 176–177), while anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon attests that, among the Yanomami people with whom he lived, “at least one-fourth of all adult males die violently” (Chagnon 1992, 4). The original title of the book chronicling Chagnon’s fieldwork, Yanomamö: The Fierce People (Chagnon 1968), bears eloquent testimony to his Hobbesian bent. Richard Dawkins, for his part, laments the contemporary Australian aboriginal peoples who, despite their highly developed survival skills, “clutter their minds with beliefs that are palpably false and for which the word ‘useless’ is a generous understatement” (Dawkins 2006, 166).

Robert Ardrey’s 1961 international bestseller African Genesis accomplished perhaps more than any other single publication of the twentieth century in shaping the public understanding of early humans along Hobbesian lines, earning it the accolade of Time magazine’s most notable nonfiction book of the 1960s. Ardrey’s argument is as emphatic as his prose is soaring:

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. A human being is a problem in search of a solution. We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.

(Ardrey 1961, 348)

Luckily for human beings, Ardrey has found the solution to humanity’s woes, and its name is Western civilization. In African Genesis, both sides of the Pinker postulate are on full display: early humans in “the lawless Pleistocene” (244) were brutal and thuggish, and modern, civil humanity has risen above its primitive and violent roots, though we still bear the indelible mark of “Cain’s children” (315).

A similar note is struck by Yuval Noah Harari who comes, Chamberlain-like, waving a declaration of peace in our time with his assertion that, while it appears that ancient societies could be brutal or irenic, now “[w]e know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war – and we usually succeed in doing it” (Harari 2015, 1). A similar position is held by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990, 106) and psychologist Eric Gander, for whom pre-state societies “tend overwhelmingly to be more warlike, xenophobic, paternalistic (if not misogynistic), and just plain dangerous than the worst liberal-democratic society on earth” (Gander 2004, 244).

Both Timothy Garton Ash and Simon Schama take the occasion of the 2005 New Orleans flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to offer the Hobbesian assertion that civilization is, in the words of Garton Ash, “the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature, including human nature,” and if we but withhold the fundamentals of organized life like water and personal security, we will find that “we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all” (Garton Ash 2005), a state that Schama likens to “the brutality, destitution, desperation and chaos of the Third World” (Schama 2005). David Starkey makes the same point in relation to the internet: “[W]hat we can now see from Twitter is that Thomas Hobbes is absolutely right and that Rousseau is absolutely wrong” (Starkey 2019), a judgment it is now possible to verify because “the world wide web has turned the old philosophical conceit of the state of nature from a fiction into a (virtual) reality” (Starkey 2020). This “thin veneer” argument is echoed down the centuries by thinkers like Adams and Adams (1876, 149): “All men would be tyrants if they could”; Schopenhauer (1957, 18): “Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast”; Haggard (1887, 13): “Civilization is only savagery silver-gilt”; London (1910, 41): “Civilization […] has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer”; Burroughs (1983, 28): “As though it had been but a brittle shell, to break at the least rough usage, the thin veneer of his civilization fell from him”; Milton Friedman (1975, 31): “What kind of society isn’t structured on greed?”; and Peterson (2002, 315): “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?”¹³

The Hobbesian view has also been kneaded into Western imaginaries by a succession of novels, plays, films, and video games, from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 “Heart of Darkness” (Conrad 2017) and Jack London’s 1903 The Call of the Wild (London 2009), to William Golding’s 1954 The Lord of the Flies (Golding 2004) and Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 The Road (McCarthy 2022), along with George Miller’s 1979 Mad Max (Miller 1979), and the Purge franchise in which a deliberate abstention from punishing crime in a specific geographical area inevitably leads to thuggery and murder. The Hobbesian imaginary is further echoed in depictions of the struggle for survival outside the modern state such as Patricia Rozema’s Into the Forest (Rozema 2015), or the action-adventure games Far Cry Primal (Ubisoft 2016) and Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey (Panache Digital Games 2019), both of which depict ancient life as a brutal war for resources and mates.

The Hobbes lite tendency also provides the standard sense of the “state of nature” in political discourse. It is the sense behind former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s warning in 2022 that he would not let Vladimir Putin drag Europe into a “state of nature where aggression pays and might is right” (Johnson 2022), or US politician Ted Cruz’s prediction that the 2016 election cycle would be like a Hobbesian state of nature and Lord of the Flies (Cruz 2015), or again President Bill Clinton’s evocation in 1998 of a “frightening, primitive, brutal” world “completely devastated by craven greed” (Clinton 1998).

Nevertheless, the Pinker postulate has been on the receiving end of intense and persistent critique, impugning its lack of basis in anthropological research (Fry and Douglas 2014, quoted on Ryan 2019, 96), its exaggeration of ancient mortality rates (Ferguson 2013), its reliance on skewed data (Malešević 2022, 19), its focus on the wrong sort of early communities (Bregman 2020, 88), its dependence on anecdote (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 13–14), its technocratic neoliberalism, its mistaken view of the medieval world, its sanitized account of British imperial viciousness in the Middle East, and its blindness to sexual violence (Dwyer and Micale 2021). Even setting aside the question of whether these critiques are well founded, this level of backlash is far from run of the mill for a merely antiquarian theory of prehistoric behavior. The invective against the Pinker postulate bears eloquent testimony to the importance of the state of nature as a contemporary cultural battleground.

Rousseau Lite

Contemporary proponents of a lite version of Rousseau’s state of nature, for their part, are united as much by what they oppose as by what they propose: Many of them borrow one or more ideas from Rousseau, but what they share most deeply is an antipathy to the Hobbesian hypothesis. In its place they often argue for a state of nature broadly akin to that of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), peopled by “those happy Nations which do not know even by name the vices we have so much difficulty in repressing” (Rousseau 1964, 11–12n, 1997a, 11n).¹⁴ The Rousseau lite approach has two main elements, both found in Rousseau’s work but, in their lite versions, cut free of other Rousseauian countervailing or problematizing passages: a positive view of nature and of a “natural” way of life, and a suspicion of, or antipathy to, modern Western society.

Exemplary of this view, Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall’s Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Widerquist and McCall 2016) disputes the customarily self-evident truths of the Hobbesian hypothesis and Lockean proviso. For Widerquist and McCall, the motivations to believe this story are entirely ideological: It was “never more than a colonial prejudice” (217).

The Rousseauian identification of warfare and disease with settled agricultural communities and not with earlier, foraging peoples (DI 138/138 [I.10]) is echoed by James Scott in Against the Grain (Scott 2017). Conspicuously silent about Rousseau, Scott impugns social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke for contributing to the dominant narrative of a “sequence of progress from hunting and gathering to nomadism to agriculture,” a progression that we have “unreflectingly inherited” (Scott 2017, 7). Despite its ideological power, however, this story “had to be abandoned once confronted with accumulating archaeological evidence” (9). Refuting the Hobbesian hypothesis, Scott concludes that the conditions of life for barbarians living outside state structures “may often have been materially easier, freer, and healthier than life at least for nonelites inside civilization” (xii).

Published in the same year as Against the Grain, Rutger Bregman’s Humankind seeks to debunk the “hallowed tradition in the western canon” (Bregman 2020, 17) of an innately selfish and violent humanity, a tradition buttressed by Hobbes’s account of the state of nature. With some nuances along the way, Bregman concludes that “we once inhabited a world of liberty and equality” (98), but things took a turn for the worse with the emergence of the first settled communities between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. For Bregman, “Rousseau might be the true realist after all” (102) when he warns that agriculture and private property do not bring stability and prosperity but war and disease, and our history is one long and vain struggle to lift “the curse of civilization” (93–112). Developing parallel arguments to Bregman, Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019) vigorously contests Pinker’s early human violence thesis, arguing that pre-civilized humans enjoyed more robust physical and mental health, and richer social bonds, than their civilized successors, while also following a more sustainable lifestyle.

Sociologist Siniša Malešević concurs: The Hobbesian idea that a punitive regime of law and order is required to suppress the violent instincts of humanity, and that a breakdown in law and order inevitably triggers mass human violence, is “historically inaccurate, epistemologically flawed, and sociologically unrealistic” (Malešević 2022, 312). The “dominant popular understandings of post-apocalyptic violence” that fuel films like Mad Max owe more to “the long legacy of Hobbesianism” than to historical or contemporary data (312).

These recent Rousseau lite treatments of the state of nature find themselves in a lineage that draws on reflections of anthropologists like Margaret Mead in her now controversial but still highly influential Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928).¹⁵ Mead compares Samoan society very favorably with the modern West. For an explanation of its lack of conflict, “we must look principally to the difference between a simple, homogenous primitive civilization […] and a motley, diverse, heterogeneous modern civilization” (Mead 1928, 206). Mead’s picture of peace and contentment is echoed by Claude Lévi-Strauss who, in the chapter of Tristes Tropiques entitled “The Writing Lesson,” depicts how the otherwise peace-loving Brazilian Nambikwara tribe are corrupted when the anthropologist introduces the alphabet and the practice of writing, an event that engenders an “irritating climate” [climat irritant] (Lévi-Strauss 2008, 297, 1961, 289, translation altered). As for the modern West, it has left Polynesians “drowning in concrete” while shanty towns “eat away at” [rongent] Africa: the “order” [ordre] of the West coming at the price of slinging its “filth” [ordure] in the face of humanity (Lévi-Strauss 2008, 25, 1961, 39, translation altered). Like their Hobbes lite counterparts, the proponents of a Rousseau lite position often gesture towards constructing a nuanced perspective that resists caricature and takes counterarguments seriously, but once more like their Hobbes lite counterparts, they find it hard not to fall into the trap of oversimplifying human nature, in their case by romanticizing its benevolence and ignoring its brutality. It is also hard not to conclude that they are projecting contemporary, post-Romantic values like tranquility and centeredness, along with an aesthetic attunement to, and unity with, the natural world, onto past societies, rather than engaging with those societies on their own terms. Finally, Rousseauian positions can often advocate for a “return to nature” in a way that skirts over the surface of complex contemporary ecological challenges (see Levinovitz 2020) or social problems (Crossman 2024).

Like the Hobbesian state of nature, its Rousseauian counterpart is buttressed in the public mind by a phalanx of cultural artifacts. R. M. Ballantyne’s 1857 The Coral Island, to which Golding’s Hobbesian 1954 Lord of the Flies is likely in part a response, depicts three shipwrecked boys who become strong friends and build a harmonious and cooperative mini-society. In Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (pub. 1917), the ape-become-man Red Peter quips to a scientific gathering that, after having acquired a mistress, a taste for whiskey, and the habits of spitting and smoking a pipe, he is finally just like the other human beings (Kafka 2012, 91–92). The supposed immediacy, simplicity, and raw energy of a Rousseauian state of nature is partially reflected¹⁶ in the aesthetic of primitivism found in the work of artists Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, and the expressionists of Die Brücke. More recently, Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon (Kleiser 1980)¹⁷ was billed as a Rousseauian “story of natural love,” depicting two shipwrecked youths who wash up on an isolated island and live mostly innocent and pure lives pursuing a Margaret Mead–like romance.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (pub. 1894) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (pub. 1912) set the pattern for an inexhaustible stream of novels and films exploring the life of individuals who leave civilization to live in the state of nature, either to return (Mowgli) or to remain (Tarzan). In this vein, films like Nell (Apted 1994) and Captain Fantastic (Ross 2016) tell stories of pure, uncivilized souls who, like the delicate flowers that metonymically represent their vulnerability, are threatened and maltreated as they are caught in the power struggles of modern society. In The Mosquito Coast (Weir 1986) and Dances with Wolves (Costner 1990), characters disillusioned with the modern world find a more tranquil and meaningful life away from civil society. Against the backdrop of the devastating destruction of deforestation and damming in the Brazilian rainforest, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (Boorman 1985) depicts how a kidnapped Western child grows up with a tribe and, at the climactic end of the film, rejects his father’s attempt to “rescue” him. There are also strong echoes of the ethos of a Rousseauian state of nature in the ubiquitous appeals to the presence of the “natural” and absence of “artificial” ingredients in the foods and beauty products on our supermarket shelves (see Levinovitz 2020).

No State of Nature

In addition to the proponents of Hobbes lite and Rousseau lite, a third tendency has emerged in recent treatments of the state of nature, one that seeks not to defend Hobbes against Rousseau or Rousseau against Hobbes but to undermine state of nature thinking as such, claiming that both positions simplify or idealize human nature and society in different but equally problematic ways. This contemporary “plague on both your houses” approach is spearheaded by David Graeber and David Wengrow’s bestseller The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow 2021), building its grand reassessment of modern society on the foundation of a sustained attack on the state of nature idea.¹⁸ In seeking to reject the state of nature, however, Graeber and Wengrow bear eloquent witness to its influence, honoring it in the breach: Even if one disagrees with the state of nature thesis today, it is with the state of nature thesis that one is obliged to disagree, and in relation to it that one is obliged to define one’s own position.

For Graeber and Wengrow, Rousseau’s state of nature is still the “dominant story” of origins “that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 27), to which Hobbes provides the only alternative (2). What unites these two versions of the state of nature, however, is more important than their differences. Hobbes and Rousseau both supposedly tell a story of human origins based on the Garden of Eden myth, comprising one or more definitive and irreversible ruptures in the conditions of human life, and differing only in the minor detail of whether the first humans are judged as violent and selfish or innocent and egalitarian.

“As accounts of the general course of human history,” the authors argue, these classical state of nature stories fail in respect of the good, the true, and the beautiful: They “1. Simply aren’t true; 2. Have dire political implications; 3. Make the past needlessly dull” (3). On the ruins of these traditional myths of human origins, Graeber and Wengrow proceed to erect “another, more hopeful and more interesting story” based on “facts,” “remarkable discoveries,” and “new information” (3), though also incorporating conjectures of its own.¹⁹ Their new story is told with a purpose: to encourage us to “rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place” (8). They conspicuously omit to situate their own thesis in a settled modern tradition of its own, a tradition of ressourcement and emancipation at least as old as the Protestant Reformation, and a tradition that gives them a ticket to join what Bruno Latour calls the “long queue of debunkers and critics” (Latour 1993, 40).

The authors pull no punches: Steven Pinker is “to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 13), and both Hobbesians and Rousseauians comment only on those particular prehistoric remains that suit their thesis (15). Decrying the “self-assured tone” of the Rousseauians, they self-assuredly assert that Rousseau “never suggested that the innocent State of Nature really happened” (11), a claim that, as we shall see in Chapter 2, radically oversimplifies the complexities of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. Like the contrast between the state of nature and civil society itself, the argument of The Dawn of Everything advances by force of dichotomy: The state of nature motif in Hobbes and Rousseau is either “laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history” (12), or is nothing more than a fictional parable. Since it falls short of the former, it must be the latter.

Despite its authors’ protestations, there is a certain lingering Rousseauism about The Dawn of Everything. Rejecting the Hobbesian hypothesis, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the only fair way to compare the modern West with hunter-gatherer peoples is to ask those who have lived in both types of society, and in such cases the evidence is overwhelming: “[t]he colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter” (Graeber and Wengrow 2021, 19), whereas Amerindians incorporated into European society “almost invariably” escaped or returned freely to indigenous forms of life. The conclusion is clear: According to the only people with authority to pronounce on the matter, “Western civilization” is inferior to non-western modes of life. “Western propagandists” may talk the talk of equal opportunity, but Amerindian societies walk the walk (20).

As in the case of the proponents of the Hobbes lite and Rousseau lite tendencies, for Graeber and Wengrow, debates about the state of nature are joined at the hip to questions of the legacy of modernity and “Western civilization,” a term they dismiss as a barely more palatable synonym for “the white race” (17). To suggest that all good things like equality, freedom, and democracy originate in this Western tradition “ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide” (17). The Pinker postulate is not only false; it is also evil and ugly.

Graeber and Wengrow’s rejection of the state of nature idea inscribes itself in a much longer and often much subtler problematization of “illusions of nature, origin, primordialness, authenticity, and so forth” (Chow 2006, 201) that characterizes late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thought. For example, Jacques Derrida’s treatment of Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology contests their shared thesis of a simple transition from the primitive and natural innocence of speech to the civilized and artificial corruption of writing. Rousseau’s pure state of nature and Lévi-Strauss’s peace-loving Nambikwara are framed as nostalgic fictions, and Derrida presents in their place a supposedly more accurate, politically subversive, and endlessly complex account of arche-writing as an “originary supplement” to a speech that was never complete or pure to begin with (Derrida 1997, 214, 313; see also McDonald 1979, 88). Derrida differs from Graeber and Wengrow, however, in his refusal to replace the ousted state of nature narrative with his own handy story of progress. This refusal is echoed by Michel Foucault, who problematizes not only the state of nature itself (Foucault 2008a, 299–300) but also the underlying politics of essentialism that equates origins with fundamental truths, as well as the overarching story of progress that leads reassuringly from a condition of ignorance and barbarism to one of enlightenment and civility (see Wright 2004, 9–10). By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow’s story of moving on from the state of nature is remarkably reminiscent of the transition, in social contract narratives, from the state of nature itself to civil society.

There is nothing quite so modern, or quite so in lock step with the logic of the state of nature itself, as touting a revolutionary break with “tired common sense” views (in this case, the past of the state of nature tradition), in favor of something better, something fresh and something original, based on new discoveries and scientific evidence. As they unfold the narrative of their own research as a story of progress in the form of a new theory of social change, Graeber and Wengrow join Pinker, Widerquist, McCall, Scott, and others in retelling the modern West’s story about itself, a story of a decisive break with a past of myth and superstition, wrought through new scientific discoveries and ushering in a new, more humane, more equal age. It is the story of the transition from the state of nature to civil society.

In contrast to this performative reenactment of the state of nature story in the guise of its debunking, Derrida and Foucault represent a deeper, more thorough refusal of its logic, for unlike Graeber and Wengrow, they argue not only that a particular account of origins or progress is a myth, but that the very structure of origin-as-truth and progress-as-emancipation are likewise mythical. In a further irony, this deeper critique is, as we shall see in Chapter 6, the retrieval of a very Hobbesian idea of nature itself as artificial.

Apart from The Dawn of Everything, rejections of the state of nature idea tend predominantly to stress one or more of the elements of Graeber and Wengrow’s comprehensive argument. Among treatments that seek to overturn the idea of a once-and-for-all transition from a pre-civil to a civil state, Scott’s Against the Grain (Scott 2017) questions the narrative of progress around urbanization and the domestication of crops, denying that there is one single transitional event from hunter gathering to agriculture, or that the move from nomadism and foraging to agriculture is better for health, peace, or longevity. Similarly, Kim Sterelny’s The Pleistocene Social Contract maintains that society and cooperation emerge gradually, with no single cause (Sterelny 2021). Among those who question whether ancient societies were uniformly peaceful or uniformly war-like, Yuval Noah Harari insists that looking for signs of violent death on ancient skeletons leads to the conclusion that levels of violence depended on location and circumstance, with some areas enjoying “peace and tranquility” while others were riven by “ferocious conflicts” (Harari 2011, 68). Among discussions that seek to highlight the imperialism of state of nature thinking, Charles Mills mounts a powerful assault in The Racial Contract, pointing to excavations that give the lie to the ideology of the “state-of-nature existence of ‘peoples without history’” and calling for a “cognitive resistance to the racially mystificatory aspects of white theory,” including the state of nature idea itself (Mills 2021, 119–120). From a different political stable, Patrick Deneen also insists that a viable postliberal political theory must begin “with fundamentally different anthropological assumptions not arising from a supposed state of nature” (Deneen 2019, 196).

This anti-state of nature position also finds its way into literature and film, though in ways that tend to blend together elements of Hobbes lite and Rousseau lite states of nature, rather than problematizing the state of nature idea per se. For example, Boulle’s 1963 novel La Planète des Singes (The Planet of the Apes, Boulle 1963), the origin of the media franchise of the same name, mixes Hobbesian themes of violence, authority, and fear with a Rousseauian critique of civil society and the humans who live in it. A notably subtle treatment of the “wild child” theme, François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, Truffaut 1970) blends the innocence and aggression of the titular character Victor with the well-meaning misguidedness of Doctor Itard who seeks to civilize him: Victor both loses his innocence and develops deep emotional attachments as he enters society. The Australian film Walkabout (Roeg 1971) similarly splices a picture of the natural world as a place where “only the quick, and the strong, and the deadly can survive” and which is “no place for civilized man” (Criterion Collection 2010), with a love story of primal passion reminiscent of The Blue Lagoon. Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (Penn 2007) paints a complex picture in which violence and threat interweave with innocence and enchantment,²⁰ and Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi (Martel 2007, pub. 2001) reframes a Hobbesian struggle for existence within a fundamentally empathetic and cooperative moral psychology.

Surveying the landscape of the Hobbes lite, Rousseau lite, and anti-state of nature theorists, we could be forgiven for thinking that the contemporary culture wars consist in a series of footnotes to Hobbes and Rousseau. Time and again, what is at stake in all three of these positions is not only the state of nature story itself as a historical artifact but something much broader: an understanding of the identity, legitimacy, and implications of the stories that Western modernity tells about itself, and through which it makes sense of itself and the rest of the world.

Western Modernity en Abyme in the State of Nature

The dispatches from the trenches of the contemporary culture wars presented in the previous section begin to answer a set of crucial questions about the state of nature motif: Why all the fuss? Why does it matter whether Hobbes, Rousseau, or neither of them was correct? What is at stake in the debate over the violence or otherwise of early humanity? And why does the state of nature idea “still seem to exert a grip on our minds” and imaginations (Monbiot 2015)? This book will offer two main responses to these questions: The state of nature matters for how we make sense of the modern West, and it matters for how the modern West makes sense of itself and everything else.

What is at stake in the state of nature is a sense of how the world works (or at least how it ought to work) and how the West understands its place within that world. What lies very conspicuously on the surface of Steven Pinker’s arguments, and remains more or less implicit in the work of other thinkers discussed previously, is that the tussles over the extent of early human violence are not primarily – sometimes not at all – about defending a view of what some putative early humans did to each other in the distant past; they are about defending a view of what the modern West is doing to itself and to others in the immediate present. Or rather they are about who gets to tell the story about what the West is doing in the present, on the principle that “who tells the story creates the world” (Ryan 2019, 13). The battles over the state of nature present, en abyme, much broader cultural arguments over the fate and legacy of the West, and therefore provide a test case in which aspects of those broader arguments can be explored and stress tested.²¹

This is why the question of whether the state of nature “really happened” is largely beside the point. As Rutger Bregman helpfully reminds us, human behavior is not one of those things that is simply true, like the boiling point of water or a mathematical equation. It is one of those things that will be true if we believe it, like a stock market crash (Bregman 2020, 8). The importance of the state of nature is not a function of its historicity, but of its imaginary potency and its capacity to reveal the fragmented and contested stakes of modernity, along with the way it has actively shaped attitudes to humanity and society that, in turn, have material, social, and political consequences.

If modern civil societies have indeed substantially tamed our wild and violent instincts, and if they immeasurably improve the happiness and conditions of life for those who live under them, then whatever else it has or has not accomplished, the modern West has something to be proud of, to protect and to propagate. It can congratulate itself that, all things considered and despite not insignificant aberrations, it has, in the words of the narrator in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, done “well,” not “ill.” If, however, Western modernity has not substantially improved the health, welfare, or happiness of those who live under it and if, in the process, it has also done its level best to ruin the freedom, equality, and happiness of the rest of the world along with its own, then the social tensions it is currently experiencing in relation to its colonial legacy and its treatment of the natural world, and the challenges it is currently facing in relation to the legitimacy and hegemony of Western modes of knowledge production, are only the tip of a much larger iceberg of necessary remorse, reparation, and reorientation, as Sartre’s epigraph indicates. In other words, in the clashing interpretations of the state of nature, we can witness a microcosm of the struggle to frame the story of Western modernity.

The second way in which the state of nature matters is for determining how we can produce truth about ourselves and our world, and how such truth has been produced in the past. For the state of nature theorists themselves, along with many in their wake, the state of nature produces two types of truth about human beings and their world: truth as origin, and truth as depth. It produces truth as origin on the assumption that the initial state of a thing reveals something fundamental about its nature. It yields truth as depth in a logic according to which the true is hidden beneath deceptive appearances, namely the original purity or innate barbarity veiled under the artificial “thin veneer” of society, or the “savage within” (see Kuklick 1991, 119–181) remaining “locked beneath the lid of civilization” (Lipson 1994). The truth is something that must be uncovered and revealed, and the state of nature idea obliges by stripping back layers of civility to reveal either hidden human savagery or hidden human benevolence and purity. The notions of truth as origin and truth as depth have in common the idea that the truth is not manifest “here and now,” but it must be labored for, uncovered, and pieced together from fragments. Truth as origin and truth as depth are, furthermore, both folded into the discourse of truth as nature: society obscures and veils, but nature reveals who we really are in an unvarnished, authentic, deep, and original way. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, the instinct that truth is to be found in origin, depth, and nature is deeply engrained in modern imaginaries.

The state of nature is also a privileged site for understanding what is at stake in late modernity’s contestation of those same ways of producing truth. The culture of critique that emerges in the mid and late twentieth century is in large measure a rejection of the logic of truth as origin and as depth, and as Rita Felski notes, “[n]ature now stands for everything that critique condemns” (Felski 2015, 70).²² From this standpoint of critique, the state of nature is no longer a source of truth but a “powerful fiction” (Butler 2021, 30) that must be dissolved, or a “device” (Pateman 1997, 5) at the heart of modern masculinist, racist, colonialist, and ecocidal ideologies that must be destabilized (see Pateman 1997; Mills 2021, 12–16; Mills and Pateman 2007; Smith 2011). Origin, depth, and nature are all problematized in the mid to late twentieth-century culture of critique. Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology seeks to reduce the naïve “natural attitude” to make way for rigorous thought; Jacques Derrida insists that the opposition of nature and culture can and must be put into question, a subject he addresses at length throughout the second part of Of Grammatology (Derrida 1997, 94–316); Judith Butler identifies the state of nature as an “original fantasy,” an ideological fiction that structures modes of perceiving in a way that fosters aggression (Butler 2021, 35), while for Michel Foucault “[t]he ‘Nature’ that was supposed to confine the order of things is nothing more than the way they are thought about at a given moment” (see “The Discourse of Nature” in Foucault 1994a, 171–179). For the culture of critique, origin, depth, and nature no longer rhyme with truth but with naivety, false consciousness, and, worst of all, common sense: the cardinal sins unmasked by critical thought. The deepest truth is that there is no depth, the original assumption must be that there is no origin, and nothing is quite so artificial as the natural. In all these ways, the state of nature still provides a yardstick against which the culture of critique measures its own progress.

The Argument of This Book

This book argues for the importance and fruitfulness of a new approach to the state of nature: understanding it as a key element of modern Western imaginaries and showing how it provides fresh perspectives on critical discussions about coloniality, secularity, and ecology. This approach neither simply sees the state of nature as a machine for producing truth, nor straightforwardly as an ideology to be destabilized and critiqued; it shows what is at stake in the state of nature idea, and how its patterns and rhythms continue to resonate in late modernity.

Chapter 1 argues that the motif functions in three important ways. First of all, as a lexical term with a complex prehistory in theological discourse, used in at least thirteen distinct senses and to many different ends. Secondly, as a myth – or more accurately, a mytheme – that refracts perennial human concerns through a distinctively modern lens. Thirdly, as an element embedded in modern social and cultural imaginaries, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The importance and implications of the state of nature motif cannot adequately be understood without grasping it both as an idea and as an embodied, material, geopolitical lived reality, or without seeking to understand how idea and reality relate to each other.

Chapter 2 continues to explore the state of nature’s importance and implications by approaching it through the lens of social and cultural imaginaries. It starts from a simple but productive premise: The state of nature is part of a story. Approaching it in this way provides a crucial bridge between the state of nature as a textual artifact and as an influence shaping modern lived experience. The chapter draws on the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur, whose ideas of “emplotment,” “concordant discordance,” the “world of the text,” the “world of the reader,” and “threefold mimesis” (Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988) provide a framework for investigating how texts inform imaginaries and lived experience. Analyzing key passages from the three major narrative state of nature theorists, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau,²³ the chapter reveals their accounts as virtuosic exercises in sense-making, crafting the imaginary of the state of nature out of a heterogeneous range of experiences, reports, cultural commonplaces, and assumptions that rest on a complex web of analogies, metaphors, and myths. Yet Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau yield three very different modern imaginaries of the state of nature, and the fragmented nature of these imaginaries helps to make sense of broader fractures and fragmentation in late modernity.

Chapter 3 is the theoretical engine room of the book. It argues that the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, despite their differences, describe similar theoretical gestures that can be traced across many areas of modern life. These gestures are theorized in terms of an approach to intellectual history that can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, and Michel Foucault, identifying regularities that subtend different discourses across a historical period and that, in the foreword to The Order of Things, Foucault calls “figures” (Foucault 1994a, x). The chapter identifies three interconnected figures of the state of nature: first, a flattening of social, ethical, and cultural space and time that requires an active curation of blankness and an active forgetting of cultural complexity; secondly, the introduction of a single determinative partition into this flattened space, raising problems of the temporal and logical relationship between civil society and the state of nature from which it supposedly emerges; thirdly, a normalization in which one side of the partition is taken as a yardstick against which the other side is measured. These figures run through each of the very different state of nature accounts, making them fragments of a greater whole rather than incommensurable and unrelated imaginaries.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 use the approaches elaborated in the first half of the book to examine three crucial features of the fractured modern world through a state of nature lens. Chapter 4 sheds new light on the importance of the state of nature motif in the lived experience of colonialism and coloniality, and subsequently of Western imaginaries more broadly. It contends that the imaginary of deracination and fractured relationships to place, culture, and memory that characterize the colonial state of nature becomes, in time, the dominant imaginary of Western modernity itself, with the consequence that the late modern West exists in a condition of “generalized coloniality” characterized by a series of fractures. This account of the normalizing of colonial imaginaries challenges the influential orientalist notion of the non-Western world as “other.”

Chapter 5 considers how the state of nature both shapes and problematizes distinctively modern forms of secularity. It argues that the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau conform neither to a “disenchantment” nor to a “migration” paradigm of secularization, but that they reveal a subtler movement at the heart of modern Western secularization: a “subversive fulfilment” that fractures religious tradition in a double movement of both continuing and breaking with it. The state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau also provide a schema of three fragmented modes of modern Western secularization, each of which can be traced to the present day: a Hobbesian “deflationary,” a Lockean “collateral,” and a Rousseauian “psychologizing” secular.

Chapter 6 begins by showing how rival state of nature accounts present in condensed form fragmented modern attitudes to the natural world, and how those very different and irreconcilable attitudes are at the heart of the multiple aporias that structure the contemporary ecological crisis. Hobbes considers nature something to be exited and bettered, Locke thinks it something to be made productive, and Rousseau seeks to heed and conserve it, these interpretations providing contradictory impulses that make visible some important tensions in modern ecological discourse.

The book concludes by arguing that the enduring power of the state of nature is in how it makes sense of the fractured mind of Western modernity, with its irreconcilable tensions, fragmented dreams, and contradictory fears, yielding a distinctive and nuanced perspective on Western modernity’s contested legacy and uncertain future.

In the pages that follow, I come neither to praise Western modernity nor to bury it, though we might be forgiven today for thinking that those are the only two options available to us. I come, rather, to make visible important facets of its complex underbelly, with the state of nature at its heart. Despite the shared assumptions of contemporary Hobbesians, Rousseauians, and anti-state of nature theorists, the book concludes in the spirit of Mephistopheles’s chilling answer to Marlowe’s Faustus, that great icon of the noblest and worst of modern ambition:

FAUSTUS. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. (Marlowe 1990, 12)

The state of nature continues to haunt, shape, and make sense of modern Western imaginaries: their fractured politics, values, hopes, and fears. How comes it, then, that we late moderns are out of the state of nature? Why, this is the state of nature, nor are we out of it.