The more I have encountered libertarianism and all that that broadminded ideology embraces the more often I have needed to review and examine what underpins my own political philosophy. I find much solace in my growing certainty that nothing I hold to be true is founded on libertarianism but upholds it instead. It just goes to show that even if a man builds a stick hut on solid rock, it will last much longer than a mansion built on sand. In my position, however, I happen to have a mansion built upon a solid rock foundation.
In time, I hope to publish more thorough examinations of the libertarian sophistical system, but for the present, I wanted to put down a few thoughts on one fountainhead of modern liberalism (from which source individualism and libertarianism likewise grow), the "state of nature".
The "state of nature" supposedly is one in which man is removed from―existing prior to and without aid of―political society, i.e., government, law and pre-established social connections. While in some cases that isolation is complete, not every theory requires the abolition of all natural connections and bonds. As expounded here, for example, marriage and family contracts are not held to be under the penumbra of the political "social contract" in some cases. The theory is a thought experiment trying to discern what rights a man possesses before he opens political negotiations with his fellow man. Its aim is to discover the natural rights of man by giving him a political blank slate. In more extreme cases―Hobbes comes immediately to mind―it isolates him completely when man is demonstrably incapable of living an isolated life. It always amused me that mothers seemed to be no part of Hobbes' natural state: after all, what would every mother think of her child if he proved incapable of peaceful negotiation except wherein he needed to preserve his own life. It seems perfectly normal to assume that these men are, like Adam, created without mothers, but not created, unlike Adam, with an inherent need for friendship and community―even community with God. Perhaps Locke's state of nature more closely resembles reality than does that of Hobbes; however, a less-than-personal approach to God also distorts the natural need in man for communion.
It is no accident that Locke and other social contract theorists stumbled upon the fundamental rights of life, liberty and property which happen to coincide with three undeniable instincts an individual has to live, to choose the good and to possess things. It would have been more remarkable had Locke insisted that these three impulses did not constitute three such natural rights, as they had been recognized not only by the ancient rationalists, but also had been divinely sanctioned in the Old Testament ("Thou shalt not murder", "Thou shalt not steal", "Love thy neighbor as thyself"), reaffirmed by Christ during His ministry and maintained and defended by His Church for seventeen centuries. It could be argued instead that Locke chose those three natural rights because he could not escape the rational tradition of the West.
The search for natural rights is limited by those who chose to examine what man has in a state of nature rather than what man is by his own nature, to discover what a man does in pristine conditions rather than what a man is which manifests itself regardless of his circumstances. One can more accurately observe what a man is by how he acts in every circumstance than by how he acts in one protean situation. That man is endowed with certain natural rights should be evident through nature, not constructed by nature.
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