CIVIL SOCIETY IN LOCKE'S STATE OF NATURE

The individual and society

Chapter 2 reconsiders the question posed by Adam Ferguson: is there a contest between commitment to social relationships and selfishness, or is it in the individual's interest to sustain social relationships? The chapter gives some examples that show how people strive for order as much as for disorder. It argues that success or failure in sustaining social relations must be explained by the ‘ecology’ of social interaction. What are the benefits to the individual of investing in social relationships? Different social strategies are most likely to succeed in different social environments and, if the social context deteriorates (as it did with the collapse of socialism in Yugoslavia), people may respond by narrowing the scope of their social relationships. The chapter therefore also asks to what extent ecological approaches to biological evolution can provide appropriate models for explaining social process. Chapter 3 will use this framework as a basis for analysing the breakdown of social order.

Thomas Hobbes envisaged the natural human condition as one of random disorder, in which every individual sought their self-preservation by trying to control others (Hobbes 1970: 65). People would only be willing to work for the general good if they could be confident anyone who cheated was punished. Just as Garrett Hardin supposed ‘freedom in a commons brings ruin for all’ through over-exploitation (Hardin 1968: 1244), so Hobbes imagined that people living in the ‘natural human condition’ would readily surrender sufficient personal freedom to a chosen sovereign to enable him to enforce peace.