The State of Nature Theory

Around the time that Hobbes was doing his thing, there was a competing school of thought, I believe it was founded by a French guy named Rousseau, that believed people were better off before governments were invented and man lived in a "state of Nature".  I don't think that Rousseau was particularly religious but, in those days, even the Atheists and Deists believed that the Earth was only about 5,000 years old.  This belief went largely unchallenged until the development of sciences like archaeology and geology, mostly in the 19th Century.  It's doubtful that either Hobbes or Rousseau knew much about prehistoric cultures, so it was mostly speculation on their parts.

I seem to remember reading somewhere, probably National Geographic, that the average cave man lived for about 20 years and that his body was pretty well busted up by the time he cashed in.  This would seem to confirm the "nasty, brutish, and short" theory but, as Uncle Ken's man Hume pointed out, correlation does not prove cause and effect.  Was life nasty, brutish, and short because there were no governments? Maybe, but it's just as likely that there were no governments because life was nasty, brutish, and short.  With people dying off almost as fast as they were making babies, the world was probably a lot less crowded that it is today, making governments unnecessary.

Last I heard, Libertarians believed in minimal government, it's the Anarchists who believe in no government.  I conversed with an Anarchist once on the internet, and I asked him if he could totally eliminate government, what would he replace it with.  His answer was "voluntary cooperation".  I replied that, if everybody would voluntarily cooperate with each other, government would indeed be unnecessary, but they won't.  He didn't seem to have an answer for that one as I never heard from him again.