In social contract theory, state of nature is a term for the way people lived before they formed organized societies.
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State of Nature Term Timeline in The Racial Contract
The timeline below shows where the term State of Nature appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1, Part 1: The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological
...use race to seize and preserve power. In the traditional contract theory, people leave the state of nature and become civilized when they form society. But in the racial contract, certain people identify...
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Chapter 2, Part 1: The Racial Contract norms (and races) spaces, demarcating civil and wild spaces
According to white social contract theory, Europeans turned Europe from a “presociopolitical space” (the state of nature ) into a “postsociopolitical space” (a civilized land). Meanwhile, they viewed non-Europeans as “savages” (meaning...
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...and settlers portrayed the world outside Europe as a monstrous and immoral version of the state of nature , particularly because it wasn’t Christianized. The trope of “the journey into the interior” depends...
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Chapter 2, Part 3: The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract and is continually being rewritten
Thomas Hobbes famously argued that the state of nature is a constant state of war, in which people live “nasty, brutish, and short” lives....
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...was controversial in Europe because he suggested that Europeans hypothetically could have lived in a state of nature —meaning they could fall to the same level as non-white people. But later social contract...
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Next, John Locke imagined the state of nature as a kind of cooperative society based on the natural laws of money and private...
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously imagined the “noble savage” living freely in the state of nature . However, he only depicted non-white people as savages. Meanwhile, he argued that Europe was...
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