In ethics, political philosophy, social contract theory, religion, and international law, the term state of nature describes the hypothetical way of life that existed before humans organised themselves into societies or civilisations.
Since Mozi promoted ways of strengthening and unifying the state (li, 利), such natural dis-organisation was rejected: In the beginning of human life, when there was yet no law and government, the custom was "everybody according to his rule (yi, 義)."
As a result, father and son and elder and younger brothers became enemies and were estranged from each other, since they were unable to reach any agreement.
— Chapter 3 - 1[2]His proposal was to unify rules according to a single moral system or standard (fa, 法) that can be used by anyone: calculating benefit of each act.
In that way, the ruler of the state and his subjects will have the same moral system; cooperation and joint efforts will be the rule.
Hobbes described this natural condition with the Latin phrase (bellum omnium contra omnes) meaning "war of all against all", in De Cive.
[6] John Locke considers the state of nature in his Second Treatise on Civil Government written around the time of the Exclusion Crisis in England during the 1680s.
[7] This view of the state of nature is partly deduced from Christian belief (unlike Hobbes, whose philosophy is not dependent upon any prior theology).
The conservative party at the time had rallied behind Filmer's Patriarcha, whereas the Whigs, scared of another persecution of Protestants, rallied behind the theory set out by Locke in his Two Treatises of Government as it gave a clear theory as to why the people would be justified in overthrowing a monarchy which abuses the trust they had placed in it.
He affirmed instead that people were neither good nor bad, but were born as a blank slate, and later society and the environment influence which way we lean.
The modern society, and the inception of private property, is blamed for the disruption of the state of nature which Rousseau sees as true freedom.
[11] David Hume offers in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that human beings are naturally social: "'Tis utterly impossible for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteem'd social.
"[12] Hume's ideas about human nature expressed in the Treatise suggest that he would be happy with neither Hobbes' nor his contemporary Rousseau's thought-experiments.
[14] Karl Marx's concept of primitive communism—or the economic mode of production before the development of class systems—may be seen as analogous to the state of nature.
Rawls reasons that people in the original position would want a society where they had their basic liberties protected and where they had some economic guarantees as well.
Such a conclusion led some writers to the idea of an association of nations or worldwide civil society, an example being Immanuel Kant's work on perpetual peace.
In his work the Law of Peoples, Rawls applies a modified version of his original position thought experiment to international relationships.
Within international relations theory, anarchy is the state of affairs wherein nations exist without a higher power to govern them.
Realism approaches global politics as if the world's nations were each an individual under a state of nature: it tends to take anarchy for granted, and does not see a solution to it as possible or even necessarily desirable.
Liberalism claims that anarchy may be mitigated through the spread of liberal democracy and the use of international organizations, thus creating a global civil society; this approach may be summed up by the words of George H. W. Bush, who sought to create "a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations".