Three thinkers imagined life with no government. They agreed on nothing.

For most of European history, nobody had to argue for a king’s right to rule. It was simply asserted — divine right, God’s placement of a monarch the way God placed the sun in the sky, and the sun does not require a permit. That certainty did not survive contact with the seventeenth century. England executed a king in 1649, deposed another in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and spent a century watching religious wars demonstrate exactly how dangerous “God says so” becomes once two sides disagree about what God actually said. Into that wreckage, across roughly 110 years, three thinkers proposed the same startling move: strip government away entirely, imagine humanity in a raw “state of nature,” and ask what people there would rationally agree to build. Government, on this account, isn’t handed down from above — it’s a contract struck between equals. The three of them imagined that starting point so differently that they walked away with three incompatible deals.

Thomas Hobbes had lived through the English civil war directly, and it shows in the deal he proposes. Published in 1651, Leviathan imagines a state of nature as “a war of every man against every man,” a condition where everyone has roughly equal capacity to kill everyone else and nobody can afford to trust that the next person won’t strike first — which makes striking first rational self-defense. Life there, in Hobbes’s own words, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” His remedy matches the diagnosis in scale: everyone agrees, in one mutual covenant, to hand over their natural right to a single sovereign with near-total authority to keep the peace — not because the sovereign is virtuous, but because any sufficiently strong referee beats no referee at all.

John Locke, publishing Two Treatises of Government in 1689 during the Glorious Revolution, started from almost the opposite premise. His state of nature is one of “perfect freedom,” populated by people who already have real rights to life, liberty, and property, restrained from harming each other by reason — a built-in natural law they can discover on their own. Government doesn’t invent those rights; it exists only to protect them more reliably than individuals could manage alone, since nobody is an impartial judge in their own dispute. That framing has teeth: because government is a trust granted for a specific job, a government that betrays that trust forfeits its claim to be obeyed, and can legitimately be resisted or overthrown.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived more than seventy years later with a diagnosis neither Hobbes nor Locke had considered. The Social Contract (1762) opens with the line “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” and Rousseau’s state of nature explains why: people in it were never predators or already-rational rights-holders, but something closer to solitary, contented, mostly peaceful animals, equipped with a natural instinct he called pitié — built-in compassion. The corruption, in his telling, came later, once people began comparing themselves to each other and, decisively, once someone first fenced off land and claimed “this is mine.” Private property and social comparison invented vanity, envy, and domination in one stroke. Rousseau’s fix is the trickiest of the three: each person merges their individual will into the “general will” of the whole community, aimed at the common good, so that obeying the collective law is really obeying a law you helped write. It’s this move that produces his most argued-over line: anyone who refuses to go along can be “forced to be free.”

What separates the three isn’t academic. Each thinker’s claim about human nature is doing the real work of determining how much power they think government needs. Start from Hobbes’s picture — that without a strong hand people default to mutual predation — and you land near his conclusion: nearly any functioning authority beats the alternative. Start from Locke’s picture — that people are already decent, rights-bearing reasoners who mainly need an impartial referee — and government should be limited, conditional, and replaceable the moment it stops doing its one job. Start from Rousseau’s picture — that the danger is unequal society, not raw human nature — and government’s job becomes reshaping how people live together so freedom and equality can coexist. None of this stayed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: someone justifying emergency powers because the alternative is chaos is running Hobbes’s argument; someone arguing government forfeits legitimacy the moment it violates a short list of pre-existing rights is running Locke’s (his language of unalienable rights fed directly into the American founding); someone arguing that private property and individual rights need active collective rebalancing is arguing in Rousseau’s voice, whether they know his name or not.

None of the three were writing neutral philosophy detached from their moment. Hobbes had just watched a civil war; Locke was helping justify a revolution already underway; Rousseau was diagnosing an unequal aristocratic society a few decades before it violently came apart in 1789. Their theories are arguments, not neutral descriptions, and the seams show under pressure. Scholars still debate whether Locke meant his state of nature as real history or as a thought experiment for testing what legitimate authority requires, and whether the “tacit consent” he leaned on — implied simply by living peacefully in a territory — can really carry the philosophical weight he puts on it. Rousseau’s “general will” splits interpreters over whether it’s something close to an actual democratic decision or a more abstract “true common interest” that could diverge from what a majority actually votes for — a distinction that determines how liberating or how dangerous his theory looks in practice. One correction is worth making plainly: “noble savage,” constantly credited to Rousseau, appears nowhere in his writing and isn’t really his idea — his actual state of nature is far more modest, neither heaven nor hell, just missing the specific social poisons he believed civilization introduced afterward.