Hobbes actually claimed that mankind has a duty to seek peace and that creating the the Great Leviathan (AKA a government) is the only way to do that. In Hobbes' view, people have no right of revolution either--if your governance is bad, you must just suck it down. The state of nature would be even worse.
For Locke things are a little better because Locke starts from a state of nature where natural resources are not scares(scarcity is a fact for Hobbes). As a result Locke's social contract focuses on rights rather than duties.
Rousseau seems to waffle on rights and duties.
So again, part of the myth includes one's view of the state of nature out of which a group of folks come together to form a nation/government.
However, to one of Stan's points and his parenthetic claim of identity above, even though we were social before we were human, that does not necessarily mean we were political as well. Being political does not equal being social. I think both Plato and Aristotle, the first 2 Western political theorists, at least the first two with significant extant written work, agree on that point.
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