Locke vs. Hobbes: Comparing Political Philosophies

Introduction: Two Philosophers of a Turbulent Age

Two of England's — and the world's — most important philosophers were John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Though their lives overlapped by forty years, and both witnessed the same major political battles and shifts occurring in their native land, the two men held markedly different views on the nature and purpose of government.

At the heart of the difference in their thoughts and conclusions are certainly simple differences of personality and intellect, but biographical differences likely played a part as well. In order to understand the different concepts of politics and human nature that these two men developed, it is necessary to understand the times in which they grew up and the events they witnessed.

Hobbes: Biography, Method, and the Case for Sovereign Authority

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 and was well into his adulthood when major problems began to develop between the reigning monarch, King Charles I, and the Parliament that sought to severely limit his power and ability to single-handedly direct the government.

As with many of the great thinkers of his day, the continued conflicts and eventual civil war that arose from Charles I's actions and Parliament's reactions — especially at the instigation of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell — had a profound effect on Hobbes's concept of political power and how it should be wielded. He viewed the period of strife and civil war as completely antithetical to the way governments ought to work and the way people ought to behave under a government. The series of wars, the eventual beheading of Charles I, and the subsequent Interregnum under Cromwell placed severe restrictions on society that were viewed negatively by many, and this almost certainly influenced Hobbes's thinking.

Strangely, however, this experience did not lead Hobbes to conclude that governments ought to be more liberal — in fact, quite the opposite. Hobbes's most well-known work, Leviathan, as well as his other political tracts such as The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic and Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, detail his belief that a social contract exists between a sovereign and the population he governs — one that grants the sovereign absolute rule for the people's own good. Such control, he believed, was the only way to stave off the threat of civil war, since any historical state without a powerful central government had proven through its regular periods of social and civil unrest that chaos was the inevitable alternative.

Hobbes's views on government were inextricably tied to the unique methodology he developed for arriving at his conclusions. He claimed to have developed a true science of politics, with rules based on geometry and as rigorous as those governing mathematics and the natural sciences. His historical works illuminate the problem of state instability as he saw it, while his political works propose solutions to that problem. The division in focus across his texts has led to many different interpretations of Hobbes's work and has allowed disagreements with his perspectives and proposed solutions to arise on many different levels. Indeed, despite the influence of his methodology, his political conclusions "have served mostly as a foil for the development of more palatable philosophical positions."

John Locke, perhaps the most prominent philosopher of his age — and possibly the most prominent English philosopher of all time — was just one of many philosophers who wrote nearly in direct response to Hobbes. Born in 1632, Locke was much younger when Charles I lost the throne and then his head; in fact, he did not publish any of his major works until the Restoration, when Charles II took the throne. It is impossible to say with certainty how much this affected Locke's philosophy, but his concept of the role of government and the power granted by the social contract are certainly different from Hobbes's.

Locke: The Social Contract Redirected

The idea of the social contract was a major innovation of Hobbes's, and Locke was one of many subsequent political philosophers to employ it in his own thinking. Our modern concept of the social contract between a government and its citizens is, however, much more closely aligned with Locke's ideas. Chief among these is the idea that the people have the right to revolt — a conclusion completely antithetical to Hobbes's own. Locke goes even further, suggesting that all monarchs and governments derive their power from public consensus.

To our modern democratic sensibilities, Locke's ideas concerning government and civil society are so ingrained that they seem like the only natural way to think about the subject. The notion that governments or monarchs can rightly and morally wield power not from a mandate of the masses but through physical coercion or divine right strikes us as self-evidently wrong. Yet in Locke's day, these were the standard explanations of why governments existed and how they derived their power — explanations that had prevailed for centuries.

Hobbes's idea of the social contract — which implied that the general population had some voice and even agency in establishing a government — was a truly innovative way of perceiving the nature of government. Yet the conclusions Hobbes drew from this insight amounted to little more than another affirmation of the standard power structure. John Locke was the first English philosopher to take the social contract in a more radical direction — one that in our own time appears to be merely the only logical conclusion. Whereas Hobbes believed the social contract granted supreme power to an impartial monarch or central government, Locke believed that power resided entirely in the hands of the people, and that any steps taken by the government that the people did not approve of — that is, which violated the social contract — made a popular revolution not only permissible but morally required.

In this construct, governments are supposed to serve the people they govern, not the other way around. When governments stop serving the people, according to Locke, the only morally correct response is to cease supporting that government and replace it.

It is admittedly unfair to suggest that Hobbes believed the people should serve the government. His idea of the social contract implies that the government's sole purpose is the protection and enhancement of the welfare of the governed population. But he also believed that the most efficient and lasting way to accomplish this was through a supreme, impartial, and unquestionable ruling body — meaning, in essence, that the social contract was formed by people willingly surrendering any rights they possessed, allowing the ruling body to decide what was permissible at its own discretion.

Locke, on the other hand, believed that the social contract called for the complete involvement of the people in their government, both in its establishment and in its ongoing operation. Rather than surrendering their rights, citizens in Locke's construction of the social contract use that contract as a mechanism for ensuring everyone's rights fairly and efficiently.

These descriptions of the two men's political philosophies are, of course, greatly simplified. Their ideas fill multiple volumes each, and those works have been heavily debated and reinterpreted, especially in the case of Hobbes. Simplified as these explanations are, however, they provide a solid basic understanding of both the prevailing Western perspective on government and its rights and responsibilities — that is, Locke's philosophy — and the intellectual heritage that those sentiments arose in response to — that is, Hobbes's views.

Conclusion: Opposing Visions of People and Power

Hobbes also believed in certain unalienable rights, but they applied only in the most extreme of situations. In general, he and Locke's concepts of humanity and government were diametrically opposed: Hobbes believed that people need protection from themselves, while Locke believed they need protection from the government. We can all be thankful that Locke's theories have prevailed in the modern democratic tradition, yet one must wonder when — if ever — such protection will be fully realized.