Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau were all wrong on one very important point. All three thinkers saw human beings in the state of nature as isolated individuals, for whom society was not natural. According to Hobbes, early human beings relate to one another primarily through fear, envy, and conflict. Rousseau's primitive human is even more isolated: while sex is natural, the family is not. Mutual human dependence comes about almost accidentally, as a result of technological innovations like agriculture that require greater cooperation. For both, human society emerges only with the passage of historical time, and involves compromises of natural liberty.

This is not the way things actually happened. In his 1861 book Ancient Law, the English legal scholar Henry Maine criticizes the state-of-nature theorists in the following terms:

Yet these two theories [of Hobbes and Locke], which long divided the reflecting politicians of England into hostile camps, resemble each other strictly in their fundamental assumption of a non-historic, unverifiable condition of the race. Their authors differed as to the characteristics of the pre-social state, and as to the nature of the abnormal action by which men lifted themselves out of it into that social organization with which alone we are acquainted, but they agreed in thinking that a great chasm separated man in his primitive condition from man in society.

We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes.

But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts. Aristotle was more correct than these early modern liberal theorists when he said that human beings were political by nature. So while an individualistic understanding of human motivation may help to explain the activities of commodity traders and libertarian activists in present-day America, it is not the most helpful way to understand the early evolution of human politics.

Everything that modern biology and anthropology tell us about the state of nature suggests the opposite: there was never a period in human evolution when human beings existed as isolated individuals; the primate precursors of the human species had already developed extensive social, and indeed political, skills; and the human brain is hardwired with faculties that facilitate many forms of social cooperation. The state of nature might be characterized as a state of war, since violence was endemic, but the violence was not perpetrated by individuals so much as by tightly bonded social groups. Human beings do not enter into society and political life as a result of conscious, rational decision. Communal organization comes to them naturally, though the specific ways they cooperate are shaped by environment, ideas, and culture.

Indeed, the most basic forms of cooperation predate the emergence of human beings by millions of years. Biologists have identified two natural sources of cooperative behavior: kin selection and reciprocal altruism. With regard to the first, the name of the game in biological evolution is not the survival of a given organism but the survival of that organism's genes. This produces a regularity that was formulated by the biologist William Hamilton as the principle of inclusive fitness or kin selection, which holds that individuals of any sexually reproducing species will behave altruistically toward kin in proportion to the number of genes they share. Parents and children, and full brothers and sisters, share 50 percent of their genes, and so will behave more altruistically toward each other than toward first cousins, who share only 25 percent. This behavior has been observed in species ranging from ground squirrels, which discriminate between full and half sisters in nesting behavior, to human beings, for whom nepotism is not only a socially but a biologically grounded reality. The desire to pass resources on to kin is one of the most enduring constants in human politics.

The ability to cooperate with genetic strangers is referred to by biologists as reciprocal altruism, and in addition to kin selection is the second major biological source of social behavior found in many species of animals. Social cooperation depends on an individual's ability to solve what game theorists label repeated prisoner's dilemma games. In these games, individuals potentially benefit by being able to work together, but they can often benefit more if they let other individuals do the cooperating and free-ride off of their efforts. In the 1980s, the political scientist Robert Axelrod staged a tournament of computer programs that mechanically implemented strategies for solving repeated prisoner's dilemma games. The winning strategy was called tit-for-tat, in which a player reciprocated cooperation if the other player had cooperated in an earlier game but refused to cooperate with a player who had failed to cooperate previously. Axelrod demonstrated that a form of morality could evolve spontaneously as rational decision makers interact with one another over time, even though motivated in the first instance by nothing more than self-interest.

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Excerpt (with some minor modifications by me) from Francis Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, pp.29-31.