You can find them in various Classical Chinese philosophical texts, e.g., Mozi (the Shangtong triad), Mencius (3A5), Xunzi (Chapter 19, 20, 23), and even in Hanfeizi (Chapter 49). But let’s get clear on what sort of animal or animals we are talking about.

Traditionally, “state of nature” accounts are associated with ideas put forward by such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and so on, each of whom proposed stories about what the lives of people must have been like before the genesis of civil society. By so doing, their aim is to illuminate the nature of civil society and justify its ways to us. The standard story, associated especially with Hobbes and Locke, talks about how life was nasty, short and brutish, a state of war of all against all in the state of nature, or at the very least, very inconvenient. And so civil society was formed–and here, the state of nature part of the story intersects with another important concept also associated with the same thinkers–through a social contract. But technically, the two ideas “state of nature” and “social contract” can be disaggregated.

The important thing, however, is that the explanatory force of state of nature accounts is not supposed to depend upon their being accurate depictions of what actually happened or how civil society really came into being. Rousseau was quite explicit about this:

The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings; better suited to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin, and comparable to those our Physicists daily make regarding the formation of the world. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “Exordium”, paragraph 6, in The Discourses and other Early Political Writings, Victor Gourevitch ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 132.)

And so likewise this is what has been said regarding Hobbes’ “state of nature” argument:

Hobbes’s account does not presuppose that the state of nature has ever existed historically. It is an ‘ideal’ or limiting case in which every vestige of authority and organization has been imagined away. (J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’ System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 72.)

If you think in more general terms, the “state of nature” part of such accounts are really instances of a more general pattern. So we are trying to explain the nature (and relatedly, the authority) of civil society, or the norms of morality, or the Ritual system, etc. And we do so by imagining what would life be like if the thing to be explained does not exist. Usually, it’s something bad; and so giving us reason to believe that the thing in question is important and we would that it exist rather than not. But if the account is not meant to be historical or it’s explanatory force is not determined by historical accuracy (or the lack thereof), what then constraints the acceptability of such stories? This is what one insightful reader of Hobbes says about his state of nature account:

[It] depicts the behavior to which men as they now are, men who lived in civilized societies and have the desires of civilized men, would be led if all law and contract enforcement… were removed. (C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962), 22)

In other words, what constraints the acceptability of the account is not historical evidence about what happened it the past (e.g., evidence regarding how states actually came into being), but our best knowledge about how people do as we know them do behave and our best prediction, on that basis, about how they would behave in novel settings. On this understanding, state of nature accounts are like Science Fiction–the characters are still recognizably human, except that they have faster-than-light travel, or facing off against Skynet’s terminators, or interact with aliens on a regular basis, etc.

But as I pointed out in class, there is actually an ambiguity in the general pattern–there is really not one but at least two distinguishable general patterns to such accounts. One of them is more or less properly captured by what Watkins and Macpherson said; Rousseau’s formulation may look similar, but really is an alternative. We can illustrate the difference between the two type of state of nature accounts using the example I talked about in class. Let’s say we are trying to explain the nature and importance of the brake  (in automobiles). There are at least three different things we could do, two of which are state of nature accounts.

(1) Historical Account: through historical research (combing the archives, archaeological excavations, surviving epigraphy, etc.), we construct a story about the invention of the brake (it will probably be a part of a larger story about the invention of the automobile), reconstructing the recorded personal motivations and larger social forces that made it possible and desirable, documenting the earlier failed attempts, the evolution of the design, and the impact brought about by the item’s introduction. The constraint here is historical evidence.

(2) Synchronic State of Nature: imagine the world more or less as we know it, but without the brakes. The same cars, the same roads, the same people, both drivers and pedestrians, the same traffic regulations–so we need to keep on tab our knowledge about how cars are like, how the roads are like, and how people are like given a set of traffic regulations–and on that basis predict how things would be like minus the brakes. The constraint here is knowledge about the present world (hence “synchronic”), both in terms of facts and in terms of predictable regularities. What would it be like? Well, life on the fast lanes are going to be nasty, short and brutish, as you could imagine. And so people got together (or some sage king step forward) and… invented the brake, thus allowing them to escape from the state of nature.

(3) Diachronic State of Nature: like (2) but with an important difference. Imagine what the world must have been like before the invention of the brake. Probably there weren’t cars of the sort we are familiar with back then. In some sense, we are talking about the same people, but we need to take into account how they would most probably have different motivations and expectations living in a world without automobiles. Correspondingly, the roads were probably quite different too, and likewise the traffic regulations. The constraint here is similar to the case in (1), but since we are granting that changes have occurred, it can’t just be what the present world would be like if only we change this one variable. Rather, given our best knowledge about the current state of the the world and (relatively) time-invariant regularities, we try to reconstruct the processes that brought about the state of the world as we know it now–this is where the overlap with (2) comes in–and in the process resolves a problem that was faced in the past. (I hope you see that this more in line with what Rousseau said about the reasoning that physicists make regarding the formation of the world.)

There are interactions between (1) and (3). Presumably, if the point of doing (3) is to reconstruct the processes that led to the present, if we independently know facts about the past, we do need to feed them into our account as data. Conversely, when we do (1), even historians sometimes have to fill in blanks left by a lack of hard historical evidence. We might not have the records about what Caesar did after he conquered this town and when he next shows up in that other place, but we can often reconstruct what must have happened using, e.g., our best knowledge about how fast people can travel given a certain level of technology, known standard practices of the Roman military, and so on.

What, then, about the Chinese thinkers we have been talking about? I think Mozi, and Mencius were basically doing something in the region of (2), while Hanfeizi was more concerned to say something in the region of (3). Xunzi, on the other hand, might well have vacillated between (2) and (3). He was mainly telling a story in terms of (2); but some elements of it may require us to think in terms of (3). Exactly how my attribution might work for each thinker, I’ll leave it to you to figure out.