 Kant’s theory employs the same basic concepts as Hobbes’s and Locke’s – natural (or innate) rights, the state of nature, and the social contract – but he puts them to different use. In contrast to Hobbes, Kant looks upon the coercive force of the law not as a limitation on freedom but as the means of securing and extending it. In the state of nature, as he conceives of it, individuals may enjoy “wild, lawless freedom,” but the threats and constraints imposed by others prevent them from freely acting on their choices (1991 [1797], p. 127). Justified coercion under law provides a remedy by impeding those who would interfere with one’s actions, thereby hindering the hindrances to freedom (Ripstein 2009, pp. 54–55 et passim). Moreover, unlike Locke’s justification of the social contract as the way to secure one’s property and escape the “inconveniencies” of the state of nature, Kant takes the “civil condition” produced by the social contract to be the foundation that property rights and justice in general presuppose. The social contract is thus not a matter of collective consent but a moral imperative: “When you cannot avoid living side by side with all others, you ought to leave the state of nature and proceed with them into a rightful condition, that is, a condition of distributive justice” (1991, pp. 121–22). “Properly speaking,” Kant declares, the original contract is not an expression of consent to be governed; it is “the Idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of the legitimacy of a state” (1991, p. 127).