Imagine waking up in a world with no laws, no police, no courts, and no property deeds. Is that a violent nightmare or a peaceful utopia? Philosophers call it the state of nature, and this episode uses it as the starting point for a tour through social contract theory, the unwritten agreement that supposedly explains why free people surrender some freedom to a government. The hosts contrast Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan, John Locke's government as neutral referee with a right to revolution, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's general will and its risk of majority tyranny.

The second half turns to the critics and modernizers: David Hume calling the whole thing historical fiction and offering convention instead, John Rawls and the veil of ignorance, game theorists treating justice as a stable coordination equilibrium, Lysander Spooner rejecting tac ...