Men were never solitary individuals “out of all society in their natural state.”  Locke’s doctrine is false because proper reasoning confirms what Bolingbroke had been saying: “Civil governments were formed not by the concurrence of individuals, but by the association of families.”

Bolingbroke was aware of the revolutionary potential of Locke’s ideas.  Locke’s stress on the natural independence of solitary individuals is related logically to his view of men “as equal one amongst another.”  Bolingbroke thought that Locke’s arguments based on the natural equality and freedom of mankind “carry his notions on the subject a little further than nature, and the reason of things will allow.”  Much more damning, however, is Bolingbroke’s conviction that such notions subvert the established order.  The principle of the hierarchical ordering of society is threatened when the principle of natural equality is adhered to.  Distinctions vanish, the social order can be overturned, and havoc ensues.  “He who sits on a throne would inhabit a cottage, and he who holds a plough would wield a sceptre.”  The conviction that a state of perfect freedom such as Locke described would result in total chaos and anarchy prompted Bolingbroke to suggest, as Shaftesbury had done earlier, that Locke was little different from Hobbes.  Mankind possessed of such freedom woulde have come into “a state of war and violence of mutual and alternate oppression, as really as that which Hobbes imagined to have been the state of nature.”  This anarchy would be compounded by each man’s right to execute the law of nature….Each man’s pretending to be judge and executioner of the law of nature would lead to a tyranny and oppression as brutish as ever conceived of by the philosopher of Malmesbury.  Thus it is, writes Bolingbroke, “that the state of mankind under the law of nature, according to Locke, would have been very little, if at all, better than the state of nature before there was any such thing as law, according to Hobbes.”

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Bolingbroke turns his back on the liberal ideology of Locke as he asks “to what purpose it was to make any abstract system of rights, that never did nor could exist…a method of establishing civil government that never could be taken.”  Locke, he concludes, presents “a notion of natural liberty very different from the real constitution of nature.”  Our real nature demands that there always be authority; if it were ever lacking men would live in the nightmare world of the Hobbesian state of war. ~Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke & His Circle