John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's State Of Nature

How did human civilization come about? Did civilized society always exist, or was it an artificial creation? What is the truth behind the state of nature; was it a real event, and if so then how did civil society emerge out of it? Different political theorists, have differing understandings about how “modern” society came into existence, and three of these prominent figures that stand out are: John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Robert Dahl. Rousseau claims that the state of nature “should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings,” whereas Locke and Dahl portray it as an actually point in time. But regardless, their “states of nature” give insight into why human society evolved in to what is today (Rousseau. p. 46). By looking at the theories from these great scholars about the origins of humanity, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of

He also claims that in this state, man lived ideally, in an almost animistic life, content and solitary were “his self-preservation was practically his sole concern” (Rousseau, p. 52). At some point however, man began to live in small, tribal, familial communities, with no established government and where everyone was the “sole judge and avenger of the offences he received” (Rousseau. p. 74). Yet, Rousseau believes that this relatively equal society was completely destroyed by the introduction of metallurgy and agriculture which crated inequality (Rousseau. p. 75). From this inequality, civil society developed by the guidance of the rich. It “gave new fetter to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, and established forever the law of property and of inequality” (Rousseau. p. 79). According to Rousseau, civil society was corrupted from the beginning; built for the rich, by the rich, at the expense and without the consent of the