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• Literature of Liberty a Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought
• Editorial Staff
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• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Henry B. Veatch, Natural Law: Dead Or Alive?
• I: Natural Law
• “nature” and “law” In Natural Law
• The Anatomy of Natural Rights
• Egoism and Rights
• The Is/ought Chimera
• Deriving “ought” From “is”
• Facts Vs. Value-laden Whims
• Is/ought and Probable Reasons
• Does Righteous Anger Imply Rights?
• Why Be Moral?
• Truth As an Objective Value
• Was the Revolution Objectively Necessary?
• Natural Law and State of Nature
• Natural Law and the State
• Natural Rights and Anarchism
• Dworkin On Rights
• Liberalism, Rights, and Abortion
• Rights and “mercy Killing”
• Rights and the “brain Drain”
• The Natural Law Right to Work
• Grotius: Contract and Natural Law
• Rights and Communication
• II: Autonomy, Privacy, and Authority
• Bureaucracy and “the Organization Man”
• Autonomy and Anarchism
• Autonomy and Taking Responsibility
• Autonomy, Motivation, and “buck-passing”
• Schooling For Conformity
• The Schoolroom Vs. Autonomy
• Obedience to Authority
• The Meaning of Privacy
• Privacy and Autonomy
• Privacy and Consent
• The Court and Privacy
• III: The Ambiguities of Liberty
• Clarifying Freedom
• Rehabilitating Mill's “harm Principle”
• Experiencing Freedom
• Do Offers Coerce Freedom?
• The Danger of “dangerousness”
• Freedom, Motivation, and Government Programs
• Freedom Vs. Determinism
• Negative Vs. Positive Freedom
• Smith and Utilitarian Economic Freedom
• Locke, Freedom, and Tacit Consent
• Religious Freedom
• Freedom, Existentialism, and Innocent Victims
• Does Censorship Harm Freedom?
• IV: Slavery
• Slavery, Ideology, and Subordination
• Slavery and Imperialist Ideology
• Enlightenment Liberalism Vs. Slavery
• The Anatomy of a Slave Revolt
• Colonial American Slave Law
• Jefferson On Slavery
• Slavery and the Poor
• V: Planning
• Regulation and the Warfare State
• Mail, Privacy, and Social Control
• Corporate State Capitalism: Coal
• French War “planification”: Chlorates
• Bureaucracy and British Regulation
• British Foreign Policy and Stagnation
• Political Decisions and the Economy
• Government, Labor, and Multinationals
• Black Markets Vs. Regulation
• Regulation Vs. Academic Autonomy
• Government Schools and Social Control
• The Economics of Charity
• International State Planning and Inflation
• Competition and Individual Knowledge

Natural Law and State of Nature

John Anglim

• Flinders University of South Australia

“On Locke's State of Nature.” Political Studies (UK), 26 (1978): 78–90.

John Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government unfold five distinct usages or phases of the “state of nature” and reveal natural law as the motive force behind each phase. (1) The unifying core idea behind the state of nature is the stateless, autonomous condition in which humans lack an authoritative, common, human superior and are free and equal: “Men living together according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with Authority to judge between them, is properly the State of Nature...” (Second Treatise, Section 19). (2) This autonomous condition is the original condition of all human peoples. (3) But it becomes such an inconvenience for some peoples as they develop their social and economic life under the impulse of rational natural law that they leave this state of nature by forming government. (4) Even so, the state of nature still remained as the condition of some peoples, Locke thought, in his own day. (5) The state of nature continues as a constant potential and actual feature of all human communities in respect to the possibility of tyranny, absolute monarchy, revolution, or withdrawal from government.

Moral or legal equality and liberty define the essential elements of the state of nature. Human persons were free and equal, but only if they obeyed the limits of natural law. Otherwise the state of natural liberty would become a state of immoderate license. Political society becomes necessary both because men obey the natural law (creating properties, increasing population, multiplying the occasions for wrong) and because men disobey natural law (violating its tenets by having and declaring wrong intentions). Humans enter civil society by an act of consent, but in so doing they do not always or necessarily escape the state of nature. The state of nature may recur, as in war or revolution. Furthermore, some defective types of political society, chief among which is absolute monarchy, exhibit the characteristics of a state of nature.

Locke's account of the state of nature comprehends an anthropology and a conjectural cultural history. The five phases specified above are all guided by the natural law. Rational natural law leads men out of their primitive original condition to a developed economic and political life. The state of civil society is, for Locke, a contrivance surrounded and threatened by a recurrence of the natural condition, both domestically and internationally. In Locke's day, indeed, some peoples had not achieved the advantages of civil society at all.