Perhaps no single idea is more deeply ingrained in the psyche of liberalism than the political and moral salience of the “individual.” In this respect, John Locke is often regarded as perhaps the preeminent founder of liberalism for to many it is in the account of the state of nature in Locke's Second Treatise that modernity was first introduced to the natural rights-bearing, pre-civil individual who made possible the liberal civic person “constituted by moral sovereignty over one's core beliefs and practices.”

Yet the state of nature motif also presents something of a paradox for those trying to understand the individualist premises of Locke's political theory. On the one hand, the state of nature is a decidedly abstract account of the rights of the generic individual in a pre-civil condition, and as such looks like a compendium of purely formal logical deductions from a set of distinct moral propositions. On the other hand, Locke presents this theoretical account as the philosophical basis of individual rights, such as the right to own property and the right to rebel against government, that have enormous practical significance in virtually any conceivable form of political life. It is this combination of theory and practice, abstraction and contextualization, that makes the state of nature concept at once so central to Locke's political teaching and yet so difficult to grasp.