Reclaiming the Natural State: Community Consciousness Beyond the Social Contract

Abstract

Modern political philosophy has long been anchored in the contractarian imagination — the belief that political legitimacy arises from an agreement among individuals who surrender their natural liberty to an external sovereign. From Hobbes’ Leviathan to Locke’s liberal state and Rousseau’s general will, the social contract tradition conceptualised order as something granted by authority rather than generated by community. This paper argues that such contractarian reasoning contains a moral flaw: it objectifies the state as an entity outside human consciousness, alienating citizens from their collective capacity to govern. Revisiting the origins of political association, I propose the idea of a “natural state” — not a pre-political condition of chaos, but a moral and social order rooted in mutual trust, cooperation, and coordination. The natural state represents a form of community consciousness, where individuals constitute the state through their shared moral awareness rather than through the act of delegation. Drawing from Arendt’s notion of power as people acting in concert, Foucault’s concept of biopower, and Habermas’ idea of communicative rationality, the paper reconstructs the origin of political authority as an expression of human sociability rather than its restraint. By reclaiming the natural state, we rediscover the ethical foundation of political life — one that situates power within the people rather than above them. The paper concludes by framing this vision as a normative ideal for reawakening community consciousness in an increasingly fragmented and technocratic world.