"To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injusticeà are Qualities that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety [property], no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans, that can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason."
-Hobbes, on the state of nature (66).
The above quotation from Hobbes's The Leviathan exemplifies the state of nature, describing it as a realm in which our virtues are necessarily inverted to accommodate the demands of war. In this war of man against man, the rational pursuit of survival compels every individual to jealously guard his own security, lest he lose his life. Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise considered the natural state of man when drafting his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and The Social Contract. Rousseau, however, did not consider the natural state of man to be so horrifically devoid of stability and fraught with peril as did Hobbes. Rousseau's answer to the Hobbesian state of nature characterized above highlighted the fact that it is the social man that the most likely to find himself in conflict with his fellow man, not the natural man. In this, Hobbes's state of nature was rejected by Rousseau. For each of these thinkers, an impression of the natural state of man ultimately engenders a very political conclusion, which is embodied in the "social contract". A closer look at Hobbes's state of nature and Ro...