particularly the second treatise, and Rousseau’s The Social Contract 121 . There are many similarities shared between these works, and Anarchy, State and Utopia , and a few points of divergence as well. They all agree, broadly, that “man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, in Rousseau’s famous phrase, or that human liberty is naturally unlimited, but that the conditions of human social living necessitate limits to that liberty 122 . They also agree that the state, the entity that imposes those limits, is an artifice of human creation, or Leviathan, as Hobbes describes 123 . They all derive those claims from a thought experiment on the functioning of human social living prior to the state, in the famous “state of nature”, and conclude, finally, that it is an exercise of human reason to voluntarily limit their own liberty in the creation of a civil society in order to prosecute an increased liberty within the confines of that society, free from the excesses of others’ exercises of liberty. They disagree, however, on the essential nature of the individuals that comprise civic society. Between Hobbes’ pessimistic assessment of the singular and atomistic agent as echoed by Hayek, Nash and von 121 Hobbes, T. Leviathan , at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207- h/3207-h.htm, Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government , at http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/government.pdf, and Rousseau, J. J., The Social Contract , at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf, all retrieved 14/04/2016 at 14:06 p.m. 122 Rousseau, J. J., The Social Contract , at http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf, p. 1 123 “For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON - WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended;...” Hobbes, T., Leviathan , at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm, retrieved 14/04/2016 at 14:13 p.m.
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