American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761–1775 by Mark Somos (review)

“In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest.” So Thomas Paine, in the third paragraph of Common Sense, tied together the theoretical notion of a state of nature with the very real process of settler colonialism. Space, as much as time or historical development, could separate a group of people from the condition of civil society or government, leaving them in a “state of natural liberty.” The possibility, of course, was intended to resonate with his argument for American independence. While the state of nature as Paine most ostensibly deployed it was simply an illustrative fiction meant to help his readers “gain a clear and just idea” of government, they could hardly have avoided the suggestion that it might in fact exist—and that if it did, it was as the consequence of settlement beyond the reach of any actually existing government. The American continent, Paine went on, had been destined by God and nature for a separation from British authority. Now was the time to take that destiny in hand.

Mark Somos’s insightful and provocative book argues that there was something particular, something American, about the “state of nature” concept wielded by colonial authors in the fifteen years before independence. Not only was the state of nature a commonplace point of reference in political debate, but its distinct colonial development helped shape the struggle over rights, authority, and empire at crucial moments between 1761 and 1775. Far from the “war of all against all” familiar from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the state of nature sketched by colonial lawyers such as James Otis Jr., John Adams, and James Wilson was both source and repository of natural rights, a space (or moment) to which the colonists had recourse when imperial government failed them. It was also, importantly, a discursive move that deliberately reduced the scope for political compromise. This American state of nature made independence more possible because it offered a compelling yardstick by which to measure British rule, and at the same time pushed participants in the debates toward a choice between the most extreme positions: loyalty or revolution.

As the example from Common Sense illustrates, and as Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out in the opening pages of his Discourse on Inequality, even the simplest invocations of the state of nature contain a remarkable degree of complexity, ambiguity, and potential confusion. Was it to be understood as an abstract thought experiment, or a real historical or geographical phenomenon? Was it characterized merely by the absence of government, or did it lack any kind of civil or social sphere whatsoever? Did the state of nature, as a thought experiment, require the thinker to imagine individuals who had never known human society—who perhaps, as Montesquieu suggested, had been “isolated in a room and grew to age twenty supplied with all necessities except for human contact” (58)? Where did God, sin, and the divine law come in? Authors who deployed the state of nature often left many or all of these questions unanswered; or rather, they tended to assume the answers that were relevant to their own argument. No wonder some critics condemned the whole conceptual enterprise as a “phantom of the brain” (270).

Yet Somos shows that these difficulties did not prevent colonial authors from regularly framing their legal and political arguments in terms of the state of nature. In doing so, they drew of course on the principal learned authorities of their time, including Rousseau and Montesquieu, along with Grotius, Locke, Puffendorf, Vattel, and Hume. These figures’ influence on colonial and Revolutionary thought is the subject of whole libraries, but through the state of nature Somos gets at them from a new angle. For example, he argues that James Otis Jr.’s 1761 speech in Paxton’s Case—to...