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."