There has been a great debate surrounding John Locke’s state of nature as described in his Two Treatises of Government. How natural man lives, his essential character, the level of internal peace or discord in such a state, and its historical validity have all been subjects of controversy. Political theorists have demanded a coherent account of Locke’s ambiguous natural state, for upon it depends his theory of rights and obligations ascribed to man in civil society.

Most modern scholars have argued that the state of nature holds no historical validity, concluding that Locke drew the state of nature to be an analytical rather than a historical abstraction. John Dunn, for example, posits that the state of nature is an ‘ahistorical condition’, a ‘topic for theological reflection, not for anthropological research’. Dunn argues that Locke was attempting to ‘devise a criterion which was outside of history, in terms of which to judge the moral status of the present political structure’. He concludes emphatically, ‘it is neither a piece of philosophical anthropology nor a piece of conjectural history. Indeed it has literally no transitive empirical content whatsoever.’

C. B. MacPherson comes to a similar conclusion: ‘Locke, like Hobbes, introduces the “natural” condition of mankind not as an historical condition existing before the emergence of civil society but as a logical abstraction from the essential nature of man’.

Locke, however, did see his state of nature existing in a historical sense. Clearly he believed that governments exist in relation to one another as in a state of nature, but, more significantly, Locke conceived of America and its aboriginal peoples, as the English colonists of the seventeenth century found them, to be an example of man living in his most natural state.

The confusion over the historical authenticity of Locke’s state of nature arises when commentators assume that the state of nature is only seen by Locke as an embryonic model of European society. These commentators claim that Locke was only using the state of nature as a purely hypothetical construct, yet reject the idea that he believed such a state existed prior to European civilization. One can reject this historical claim about the natural state while still supporting the idea that Locke believed such natural states did exist at the time of his writing – namely, in America. While many modern scholars have overlooked the American dimension of Locke’s state of nature, some, most notably James Tully, have come to recognize the importance of the new world to Locke’s understanding of natural man.

While Locke was indeed basing his state of nature on the hypothetical condition of aboriginal man, it was also by no means based merely upon hypothetical conjecture. Locke based his wide account of man on the descriptions provided by the dozens of travel books he had in his library on the Americas, especially those by the missionaries employed by European explorers. Locke’s evidences were equally augmented by the economic writings of European explorers, as evidenced by the wide circulation amongst the seventeenth-century English elite of such books as Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, or Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimes, or Richard Hakluyt’s Principle Navigations.

Locke owned all of those works and used them, along with other accounts of the new world in his library, to provide concrete evidence of the character of natural man. While his choice of information was by no means broad or rich, in and of itself, along with “not scientific”, he chose it as the only those historical examples which could support his view that way. Locke’s selective use of information led him from the particular to justify his theory while his theoretical principles should be established before examining such records for examples. This overall is his point: “On the whole we will see in his mind the principles of morality and how he makes a judgement on man should reflect morality, law, and useful institutions of prudence from a study of history. As such terms of men ... are merely shaped by Two Treatises,” where he built his theoretical examples not on past support but stories indicating a state of primitive or early civil obligation.

In The Two Treatises, Locke criticizes Sir Robert Filmer for failing to reconcile his philosophy with the facts; a point according to Richard Ashcraft, which is central to Locke’s critique: “The telling argument against Filmer’s theory is that for all its reliance upon Scriptural history it is an inadequate account of the actual world.” Locke sets out, instead, to develop a theory based upon the principles governing civil society, using empirical knowledge as its foundation; however, it becomes evident in the structure of his work, that when Locke is establishing the theoretical judgement of the former, he must necessarily fashion “things” to evaluate the former rather than the “natural” order-to-come from evidences. As a result, Locke chose only those pieces of information which fit his theory. White Americans used this to encourage the social privileges of natural rights and civil obligation, an understanding of the ‘real’ natural man in spiritual and disordered terms.