The state of nature and war are connected through one of the most influential ideas in political philosophy: without a governing authority to keep order, human beings will inevitably slide into conflict. Thomas Hobbes made this argument most forcefully in the 1600s, describing the state of nature as a “war of all against all.” But not every thinker agreed, and the debate over whether humans are naturally warlike or naturally peaceful continues to shape politics, international relations, and our understanding of conflict today.
Hobbes: The State of Nature Is War
Thomas Hobbes argued that the state of nature, a hypothetical condition where no government exists, is essentially identical to a state of war. In his view, three basic features of human psychology guarantee conflict. First, people compete violently for the basic necessities of life and material gain. Second, they fight out of fear for their personal safety, what Hobbes called “diffidence.” Third, they seek reputation and glory, both for its own sake and because a fearsome reputation discourages others from attacking.
Hobbes used the Latin phrase “bellum omnium contra omnes,” the war of all against all, to describe this condition. Critically, he did not mean a hot war where everyone is actively fighting at every moment. He meant something closer to a permanent cold war: a state of mind in which every person understands that anyone could attack at any time. The threat of violence is constant, even when no one is currently swinging a fist. Without any authority to enforce rules, there is no trust, no cooperation, and no safety.
The famous passage from his book Leviathan captures what this looks like in practice: no industry, no agriculture, no navigation, no building, no arts, no letters, no society. Just “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Why the English Civil War Shaped This Idea
Hobbes was not writing in the abstract. He developed his ideas during the English Civil War, a series of conflicts stretching from 1642 to 1652 that pitted Parliament against the Crown and tore English society apart. Watching his country descend from political disagreement into open warfare had a profound effect on his thinking. Scholars at Durham University have argued that civil war was the most important real-world basis for Hobbes’s state of nature, and that he saw the collapse of England’s political order and the escalation into armed conflict as essentially the same process.
Hobbes himself blended the definitions of civil war, the state of nature, and anarchy, treating them as different names for the same catastrophe. When a government dissolves, whether through revolution or tyranny, the people are thrown back into the state of nature. And the state of nature, for Hobbes, always means war.
How the Security Dilemma Drives Conflict
Modern scholars have formalized the logic behind Hobbes’s argument into what is called the security dilemma. The chain works like this: the absence of a central authority creates uncertainty about other people’s intentions. Uncertainty breeds fear. Fear drives people to accumulate power for self-defense. But because defensive capability always contains some offensive capability, your neighbor sees your preparations as a threat, even if you only want to protect yourself. Both sides then arm themselves further in a self-reinforcing cycle, each becoming less secure the harder they try to become more secure.
This vicious cycle can spiral into unnecessary and tragic conflict. Neither side actually wants war, but the structure of the situation pushes them toward it anyway. The security dilemma explains why rational, peace-preferring individuals can still end up fighting, which is precisely the dynamic Hobbes described centuries earlier in less technical language.
Rousseau’s Counterargument
Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected Hobbes’s picture entirely. He argued that Hobbes made a basic error: projecting the traits of civilized people (pride, envy, fear of others) back onto a primitive condition where those traits would not yet exist. For Rousseau, the true state of nature was a time before socialization, when humans lived as mostly solitary creatures acting on basic urges like hunger and self-preservation. It was morally neutral and peaceful.
In Rousseau’s account, laid out in his 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, war is not a natural condition but a product of civilization. As people became dependent on one another, developed agriculture, and established private property, new forms of inequality and competition emerged. War, in other words, is something humans invented, not something they were born into. The state of nature was the period before war became possible.
The Social Contract as an Escape From War
For Hobbes and later thinkers, the connection between the state of nature and war is not just a philosophical observation. It is the entire justification for government. The argument runs as follows: because life without authority is so dangerous, rational people will voluntarily give up their individual freedom in exchange for collective security. This bargain is the social contract.
The contract involves two steps. First, people collectively agree to stop exercising the rights they had in the state of nature, such as the right to use force against anyone for any reason. Second, they invest some person or body with the authority and power to enforce this agreement. The sovereign can punish people who break the rules, and because the punishments are worse than the inconvenience of following the law, people have strong self-interested reasons to cooperate.
This logic also runs in reverse. When a government becomes tyrannical, dissolving the institutions that allow people to govern themselves, it effectively throws them back into the state of nature. Citizens then regain the same right to self-defense they had before the contract existed. The connection between the state of nature and war is not just a starting condition; it is a permanent threat that returns whenever political authority collapses.
Nations Without a World Government
One of the most enduring applications of this idea is in international relations. The political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued that the relationship between nations mirrors Hobbes’s state of nature. There is no world government, no authority above sovereign states that can enforce agreements or punish aggression. This condition of anarchy, in the technical sense of having no overarching ruler, is the defining feature of the international system.
Because every state wants to survive and no one can guarantee its safety, each state must rely on itself. This self-help logic limits cooperation in two ways: the ever-present insecurity about other states’ intentions, and the worry that cooperating will benefit a rival more than yourself. Waltz argued that scholars who focused on ideology, morality, or economics were missing the structural reality. Anarchy itself generates the competitive dynamics that make war a constant possibility between nations, just as it did between individuals in Hobbes’s thought experiment.
What the Anthropological Record Shows
The philosophical debate between Hobbes and Rousseau maps onto a real empirical question: were pre-state humans actually at war with each other? The evidence is mixed but increasingly clear on certain points. Reviews of ethnographic and archaeological data show that most documented mobile hunter-gatherer groups participated in lethal intergroup violence at least occasionally. Multiple lines of evidence, including archaeological remains, the behavior of other primate species, and predictions from behavioral ecology, suggest that some level of intergroup killing extends deep into human prehistory.
However, the strong Hobbesian position that hunter-gatherers lived in a constant state of warfare is not supported. Violence rates varied enormously across time and place. And both sides of the academic debate agree on a key finding: warfare generally became more severe with increased social complexity, settled living, and agriculture. The archaeological record shows a dramatic uptick in evidence of organized violence once these transitions occurred, which lends some support to Rousseau’s view that war intensified as civilization developed. The truth appears to sit between the two philosophers: humans are neither naturally peaceful nor locked in perpetual combat, but the structures they live under powerfully shape how much they fight.
Failed States as Modern Examples
Hobbes framed the state of nature as hypothetical, but modern failed states provide something close to a real-world test. Scholars have noted the striking similarity between Hobbes’s description of life without authority and conditions in countries torn apart by communal violence, where human effort and ingenuity are devoted not to building but to plundering. When central authority collapses, the security dilemma kicks in at the community level, and the spiral toward conflict follows the same logic Hobbes outlined nearly four centuries ago.
What makes the parallel useful is not that it proves Hobbes right about human nature, but that it illustrates his structural insight. People in failed states are not inherently more violent than anyone else. They are responding rationally to a situation where no one can guarantee their safety. The connection between the state of nature and war is, at its core, a claim about what happens when the structures that prevent conflict disappear.