Hobbes, Locke, and the Theological Foundations of the State of Nature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modernization is commonly understood as a process of secularization, beginning in the fifteenth century, culminating in the relegation of religion to the private sphere.More importantly, this process is understood as an intentional effort by many of the intellectual and political founders of modernity.However, this narrative may be far too simplistic.Modernity, while often understood as a secular project, seems to be inseparable from its theological origins.When closely examined, the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, two founders of modernity, makes clear that the relationship between modernity and religion is far more complicated than the standard secularization narrative suggests.Specifically, the state of nature, which is the foundation for both Hobbesian and Lockean political doctrines, is only understandable in the light of theology.While both Hobbes and Locke present state of nature scenarios, their states of nature look quite different.The main reason for these differences are the different theological and epistemological bases of both the Hobbesian and Lockean states of nature.Hobbes was heavily influenced by nominalist philosophy, and his God is a distant and arbitrary one.This renders Hobbes's state of nature an ethical vacuum in which life is nasty, brutish and short.Locke's God was far more rational, and closer to the early modern conception of a watchmaker.Through reason, Locke's God, and his commandments, are knowable.Thus, the state of nature is far more ordered and peaceful, because there is a knowable and obligatory natural law even in the original condition.What this suggests is that the early modern period and the foundations of modernity itself were highly theological, and thus our understanding of modernity as a process of conscious and deliberate secularization needs to be rethought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".