Abstract
This paper tests how effectively the bound states of strongly interacting gauge theories are amenable to an emergent description as a thermal ensemble. This description can be derived from a conjectured minimum free energy principle, with the entanglement entropy of two-parton subsystems playing the role of thermodynamic entropy. This allows us to calculate the ground state hadron spectrum and wavefunction over a wide range of parton masses without solving the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. We carry out this analysis for certain illustrative models in 1+1 dimensions and discuss prospects for higher dimensions.