John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, has a softer view of the state of nature than Hobbes; human beings are less occupied fighting one another than mixing their labor with the common things of nature to produce private property. Locke’s fundamental law of nature, in contrast to that of Hobbes, gives human beings the right not just to life, but to “life, health, liberty, or possessions.”2 Unregulated liberty in the state of nature leads to the state of war, necessitating, as for Hobbes, a social contract for the preservation of natural liberty and property. Although the state, in
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