<P> Hobbes' view was challenged in the eighteenth century by Jean - Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that Hobbes was taking socialized people and simply imagining them living outside of the society in which they were raised . He affirmed instead that people were neither good nor bad, but were born as a blank slate, and later society and the environment influence which way we lean . In Rousseau's state of nature, people did not know each other enough to come into serious conflict and they did have normal values . The modern society, and the ownership it entails, is blamed for the disruption of the state of nature which Rousseau sees as true freedom . </P> <P> David Hume offers in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that human beings are naturally social: "' Tis utterly impossible for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteem'd social . This, however, hinders not, but that philosophers may, if they please, extend their reasoning to the suppos'd state of nature; provided they allow it to be a mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never cou'd have any reality ." </P> <P> Hume's ideas about human nature expressed in the Treatise suggest that he would be happy with neither Hobbes' nor his contemporary Rousseau's thought - experiments . He explicitly derides as incredible the hypothetical humanity described in Hobbes' Leviathan . Additionally, he argues in "Of the Origin of Justice and Property" that if mankind were universally benevolent, we would not hold Justice to be a virtue: "' tis only from the selfishness and confin'd generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin ." </P> <P> John C. Calhoun, in his Disquisition on Government, (1850) wrote that a state of nature is merely hypothetical and argues that the concept is self - contradictory and that political states naturally always existed . "It is, indeed, difficult to explain how an opinion so destitute of all sound reason, ever could have been so extensively entertained,...I refer to the assertion, that all men are equal in the state of nature; meaning, by a state of nature, a state of individuality, supposed to have existed prior to the social and political state; and in which men lived apart and independent of each other...But such a state is purely hypothetical . It never did, nor can exist; as it is inconsistent with the preservation and perpetuation of the race . It is, therefore, a great misnomer to call it the state of nature . Instead of being the natural state of man, it is, of all conceivable states, the most opposed to his nature--most repugnant to his feelings, and most incompatible with his wants . His natural state is, the social and political--the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race . As, then, there never was such a state as the, so called, state of nature, and never can be, it follows, that men, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose protection they draw their first breath ." </P>

Who is the thinker associated with state of nature