Political and legal theories are often founded on assumptions about the characteristics shared by human beings, with the political or legal system said to be formed so as to advance these characteristics. Usually the presumption is that humans have a common ‘nature’ and that certain ways of co-existing are therefore ‘natural’ and pre-social. In the twenty-first century, genetic and other biological developments have become important in informing these ideas, but previously they were frequently manifested in the field of philosophy, mainly through considerations of the importance of nature or nurture, and in the distinction between mind and body, and between reason and the passions and/or the emotions. Along with the idea of a natural state for mankind, or state of nature, came the fiction of the social contract (see, e.g., Hobbes 1960; Locke 1988; Rousseau 1968; Rawls 1971). This story sits at the heart of contemporary political and legal theory, providing one of the most widely declared bases for the legitimacy of the state and of its government and laws (see Boucher and Kelly 1994). The essential argument is that human beings originally existed in a state of nature, coming together through entering into a social pact. And depending upon the particular theorist’s position, this pact or contract was one agreed either between individual persons or between the people and the state they formed. Within this tradition, the individual in the state of nature is presented in a variety of forms, with each providing the foundation of what follows. If the life of the person is ‘‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’’, because s/he is inherently selfinterested and competitive, as Hobbes would have us believe, then it makes sense to join together in the interests of individual self-preservation and security. If, however, we are by nature empathetic, caring and seek to look after each other in a