What best describes the difference between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke's ideas?

Answer 1

Locke is well known as one of the inspirations for the U.S. Declaration and of the Founding Fathers generally. While he believed all men are born into a free condition, and enter into a contract with the sovereign to protect essential Rights. Hobbes on the other hand, with his most famous saying: Life is "nasty, brutish and short."

And while Hobbes rejected the divinity of the sovereign, or his divine right to rule -- in order to obtain safety from the savageness of nature, a contract existed between the sovereign and the subject, whereas the sovereign received obedience, and the subject safety.

Answer 2

Hobbes published his most famous political philosophical treatise, Leviathan, in 1651, which was two years after a major political upheaval in England that resulted in the execution of Charles I and the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell and the British Parliament as the supreme executive authority instead of the monarchy. Locke's famous Two Treatises on Civil Governmentwas a response published two years after another major political upheaval, the Glorious Revolution that ousted Catholic monarch James II and brought in William of Orange and his safely Protestant wife, Mary, who was daughter to James II by his Protestant first wife and was therefore much more acceptable to Parliament than the Catholic progeny engendered from James' second wife. Those two-year pauses before the publications and the fact that they are both reactions to the politics of the time are really the only similarities between the two gentlemen.

Hobbes' philosophy is best summarized in his famous description of the natural state of man: when he is left to his own devices, his life is solitary, nasty, miserable, brutish, and short. Hence, he requires a government that will exercise power over his individual tendencies toward anarchy and will allow him to turn his energies towards his own betterment, and the betterment of the society he invests himself in. The image of the Leviathan is a massive monster who is made up of the parts and pieces of the society that must work together with some absolute governor in charge of the whole thing. Hobbes was not quite providing an apology for the Cromwellian revolution, but he was certainly explaining why Charles I had made such a mess of his own authority.

Locke is writing in 1690, almost forty years later, but the circumstances have changed enormously, so that when James II made it clear that he was going to pit his monarchical power against the will of Parliament, which would most certainly have led to religious strife along the same lines as the Troubles in Northern Ireland--Roman Catholic versus Anglican and Lower Church Protestant sectarian warfare. Parliament exercised its power in a most effective--and bloodless--fashion and the Catholic threat (as many in England saw it) was eliminated for all time. john Locke's treatises clarified the solid moral ground under the political movements of his time: when the governing authority exceeds its responsibilities and acts in a way (as James was doing most self-destructively) that is contrary to the will of the people, as represented by its parliamentary agencies, then the people have more than a right to rebel against the authority; they actually have a moral and political responsibility to do so. Locke was effectively arguing in favor of the necessity for revolution, under very serious conditions. Locke recognized that absolute power, as invested in the monarch, was likely to become corrupt, if not merely ineffectual and institutionalized, so he put his pen to use in the defence of more power divested through the body of Parliament. His work anticipated the work of the French philosophes in the following century, most particularly that of Montesquieu, who called for the division of executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government that we are so familiar with today. The revolutions that occurred in the eighteenth century called on Locke as their philosophical antecedent. No such tributes have been given to Hobbes, whose work tends to demonstrate a rather cynical mistrust in human tendencies rather than the more optimistic rendering Locke's work offers.

Answer 3

They had different ideas about the meaning of the social contract.