The State of Nature as the Basis for Classical Political Thought

Abstract

In this chapter, first of all, I will demonstrate that European classical authors have either widely identified the Amerindian peoples with human beings in the state of nature, or used the information about them in order to theoretically reconstruct an image of the state of nature. This was the common practice not only among political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Kant or Rousseau, but also among international lawyers like Pufendorf, Grotius and Vattel, as well as among political economists like Adam Smith and Ferguson, at the interface between literature and politics as in the case of Thomas More, Campanella, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, and by ‘fathers’ of sociology like Montesquieu. This indicates that the modern European social sciences, whose forerunners these authors are, are deeply pervaded with this concept of the state of nature and its identification with, or derivation from, the American Indians. It is interesting, too, that the concept of the state of nature did not play a crucial role in Just one or two traditions which we know today as separate disciplines, but indeed equally in all of them. It was not the case, then, that only the early ‘political economists’ or the early ‘political philosophers’ or the early ‘international lawyers’ constructed their theories on the assumption of a state of nature.