The State of Nature

The state of a nature is the state that preceded governments. There must have been a time before government, and so the question is how legitimate government could emerge from such a starting position.

Social contract theory holds that individuals in the state of nature came together and made agreements out of self-interest. It is these agreements that give legitimacy to government; people are ruled by consent.

Of course, the negotiations here envisaged never took place in the form described by contractarians; the contract is hypothetical, as is the consent. This, indeed, is one of the great criticisms of contractarianism: a hypothetical contract is not a pale form of a contract, it is no contract at all. There is no real consent, and so no real authority, in this political framework.