Estado de natureza: das origens pré-modernas a Robert Nozick

• Main Author: Antonio Augusto Madureira de Pinho
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centro Universitário de Valença 2013-06-01
• Series: Revista Interdisciplinar de Direito
• Subjects: social contract; ‘state of nature’; law and natural rights
• Online Access: http://revistas.faa.edu.br/index.php/FDV/article/view/197/162

T he aim of this paper is to present the history of the concept of ‘state of nature’, considering its early formulations in the second scholasticism as well as the reformulations put in place by the contemporary political thought. We intend to highlight how this concept suff ers from two basic infl ections in the modern thinking: the fi rst, with Th omas Hobbes and the second with I. Kant. Th us, we emphasize that the anthropological premises, adopted by Hobbes, led him to conceive the ‘state of nature’ as a ‘state of war’ and to deprive law and natural rights of any moral meaning. Th ese consequences, as we pointed out previously, were refuted or ratifi ed by the theorists of covenant or social contract that came after the authors quoted above. Similarly, we stress that since I. Kant, the most contemporary covenant theories, forego their anthropological fundamentals (except for R. Nozick) in order to rest on more abstract rational foundations (J. Rawls).