State of Nature, General Will, Species-Principle

While for Hobbes, the 'state of nature' is a 'war of all against all', for Rousseau, it is a condition of universal harmony.  But, the latter is more than a mere alternative to the former; rather, Rousseau conceives that harmony as preceding any antagonisms, which are instigated by the privatization of originally communal goods.  Now, for Hobbes, universal war is less an actual historical event than an illustration of what he posits to be the fundamental Psychological principle of human behavior--individual Self-Preservation.  Likewise, therefore, Rousseau's state of nature corresponds to an underlying unifying factor in all human interaction.  Now, that factor could be called 'General Will', except that in his system, that term signifies an a posteriori regulative factor in the determination of the general Good, rather than a pre-condition in such a process, though with a little more attention, he might have proposed that the former is the actualization of the latter.  In any case, Rousseau's imagery can also be recognized as an indication of the presence of a Species-Principle underlying all human interaction.