Chapter 11 From the State of Nature to the Natural State

Transforming the Foundations of Science and Civil Progress in Eighteenth-Century British Political Thought

In: The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea
Author:
Pamela Edwards
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Abstract

British political thought in the eighteenth century frequently built arguments on the foundations of 16th- and 17th-century accounts the State of Nature. Understood to be an original and pre-civil condition, this natural state was taken to be either a distant historical reality or an enduring allegory of peace and war. But whether hostile or benign, real or imagined, it established the operative principles for political and social argument and action in terms of a zero-sum game. It was also conceived of as a set of static conceptual binaries, which were held to undergird the scientific and rational nature of the world. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the rise of a new and dynamic philosophy of action suggested, by extension, a new science of history. Increasingly biologized and progressive in nature, the rise of anthropogical history was bound to a new science of politics. In consequence, the question as it was formerly posed, as to whether the state of nature was some utopian ideal to be recaptured or a nightmare of conflict and instability to escape from, no longer held. Instead, the question was increasingly understood as a deep inquiry into the complexity of living systems, whether political, social or natural. The adaptive possibilities of this new political vitalism were both conceptually and rhetorically better suited to the comparative, developmental, and hybrid nature of commercial empire.

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