English philosopher, author of Leviathan (1651). Argued that without sovereign authority, human life is war of all against all — "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Proposed that rational individuals contract together to create an absolute sovereign as the only guarantor of peace. Widely considered the founder of modern political philosophy.
English philosopher, author of Two Treatises of Government (1689), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Argued that all people possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and that government's sole legitimate purpose is to protect these rights. His ideas directly inspired the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
| Category | Hobbes | Locke |
|---|---|---|
| State of Nature | War of all against all; life is short and violent | Governed by natural law; people have rights but insecurity exists |
| Social Contract | Irrevocable transfer of rights to absolute sovereign | Conditional trust; government must protect rights or can be replaced |
| Legitimate Authority | Absolute sovereignty; no right of rebellion | Consent of governed; right to revolution if rights are violated |
| Key Work | Leviathan, 1651 | Two Treatises of Government, 1689 |
| Political Influence | Inspired absolutism; cited by authoritarian theorists | Inspired American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, liberal democracy |
| Philosophical Legacy | Materialism; realism about human nature; secular political theory | Natural rights; empiricism; toleration; separation of church and state |
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in April 1588, allegedly because his mother was frightened by news of the Spanish Armada's approach. He later said he was born "a twin to fear" — and fear, more than any other emotion, runs through his political philosophy. He was a sickly child who outlived almost everyone he knew, dying at 91 in 1679. He lived through the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration — events that confirmed, to his mind, that the alternative to absolute sovereign authority was not liberty but chaos, massacre, and the collapse of everything civilization had built. Leviathan, published in 1651, was written during his eleven years of voluntary exile in Paris, where he had fled the Parliamentary side during the Civil War (and where he tutored the future Charles II in mathematics). It is one of the most systematic works of political philosophy ever written: a materialist account of human nature, leading to a theory of the state as the necessary solution to human violence.
John Locke was born 44 years after Hobbes, in Somerset, in 1632. He grew up during the Civil War and came of age under the Commonwealth and then the Restoration. Where Hobbes's political experience had taught him that order required absolute authority, Locke's had taught him that authority unchecked by law was the greater danger. He was the personal physician and political ally of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the leaders of the Whig opposition to Charles II's Catholic-leaning court. When Shaftesbury's political position became untenable, Locke went into exile in the Dutch Republic in 1683, returning to England only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brought William of Orange to the throne — the event that vindicated, in practice, the theory of legitimate revolution that Locke had been developing in secret. His Two Treatises, published in 1689 and nominally written to justify the Glorious Revolution, were actually written a decade earlier. They laid out the most influential theory of limited government in the history of political thought.
The central question that both Hobbes and Locke needed to answer was: why do people need government at all? Their different answers produced their different politics. Hobbes's answer begins with his account of human psychology: human beings are, fundamentally, self-interested creatures in perpetual competition for scarce resources and social recognition. Without a power capable of overawing all of them, they are in a condition of war — not necessarily actual fighting at every moment, but a disposition to fight when opportunity or necessity presents itself. The famous passage in Chapter 13 of Leviathan describes this condition with the controlled ferocity that makes Hobbes's prose unique among political philosophers: "In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Locke's state of nature is recognizably the same thought experiment — human beings before political authority — but arrives at a different diagnosis. For Locke, the state of nature is governed by natural law, which rational beings can discover: the principle that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. People in the state of nature already have rights — they are not created by government but are pre-political. The problem is enforcement: in the state of nature, each person must judge and enforce their own rights, which creates inconvenience, partiality, and escalation. Government is created not to escape perpetual war but to provide an impartial umpire and enforcement mechanism for rights that already exist. This is a crucial distinction. For Hobbes, rights are created by the sovereign. For Locke, rights exist prior to and independently of the sovereign, and the sovereign exists to protect them. If the sovereign fails to protect them, or actively violates them, the social contract is broken and resistance is justified.
The practical consequence of this theoretical difference is enormous. Hobbes's sovereign cannot be legitimately resisted, because the point of sovereignty is precisely to provide an authority whose commands are not subject to private judgment. If everyone could decide for themselves when the sovereign had overstepped, you would be back in the state of nature in which everyone's private judgment prevailed and violence was constant. The only exception Hobbes allows is when the sovereign cannot protect you — at that point, the entire rationale for the social contract dissolves and self-preservation takes over. This is not a right of revolution; it is the dissolution of the contract by the sovereign's own failure. Under Hobbes's framework, Cromwell's Parliament had no justification for executing Charles I; the English Civil War was exactly the catastrophe his theory predicted from the weakening of sovereign authority.
Locke's framework reaches the opposite conclusion. Government holds its authority in trust from the people, exercising delegated power for defined purposes — primarily the protection of life, liberty, and property. When a government systematically violates these rights — when a king rules by arbitrary decree, taxes without consent, or suppresses the legislature — it dissolves the trust on which its authority rests, and the people recover their original right to constitute a new government. This is not revolution in the sense of chaos; it is the reassertion of the original social contract. Locke wrote this argument in direct response to the claims of absolute monarchy advanced by Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha argued for the divine right of kings derived from Adam's dominion over creation. Locke demolished Filmer's argument in the First Treatise and then constructed his own alternative in the Second. Thomas Jefferson read Locke carefully, and the Declaration of Independence is, in its core argumentative structure, Lockean political theory applied to colonial America.
The 20th century offered repeated evidence for both positions. Hobbes's insight that security is the precondition for all other values — that without a functioning state, the warlords, militias, and criminal organizations fill the vacuum — was confirmed by the experience of failed states from Somalia to Iraq, where the withdrawal of sovereign authority produced not Lockean natural liberty but Hobbesian war. The humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and 2000s grappled constantly with the tension between Lockean natural rights (which argued for protecting populations from their own governments) and Hobbesian state sovereignty (which argued that even bad order is better than disorder). The theoretical debate between them was replicated, with real bodies, in the streets of Mogadishu, Sarajevo, and Baghdad. Meanwhile, Locke's legacy in constitutional government — the idea that state power must be limited, that individuals have rights the state cannot legitimately violate, that religious and political freedom are foundational — has produced the most secure and prosperous societies in human history. The question is not whether Hobbes or Locke was right; it is under which conditions each man's analysis applies.
Locke on political legacy: the liberal democratic tradition — constitutional government, natural rights, consent of the governed, right of revolution — is Lockean from root to branch. The American founding, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: all speak Locke's language. Hobbes on philosophical realism: his account of human self-interest, the necessity of a monopoly on violence, and the fragility of social order under conditions of weak authority has been confirmed by history more often than optimists would like. The best modern states are Lockean in aspiration and Hobbesian in structure: they protect natural rights through the exercise of sovereign authority backed by the credible threat of force. Both men were necessary. Neither was sufficient.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is a war of all against all, in which human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." For Locke, the state of nature is governed by natural law — the rational recognition that all humans have equal natural rights to life, liberty, and property. It is inconvenient but not intrinsically violent; people create government to protect rights they already have, not to escape a war.
Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is a close paraphrase of Locke's natural rights triad of life, liberty, and property. Locke's argument that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed, and that citizens have the right to overthrow a government that violates their natural rights, provided the philosophical justification for revolution.
Hobbes argued for absolute sovereign power as the only solution to the violence of the state of nature. But he was not authoritarian in the modern sense: his sovereign ruled by consent, and the obligation to obey ceases if the sovereign cannot protect you. He was also a materialist who severely limited church power — which was radical for his era. His theory produces an absolute state but derives it from rational self-interest, not divine right.
Hobbes's social contract is a one-time, irrevocable surrender of individual rights to a sovereign who stands outside the contract and cannot breach it. Once made, subjects have no recourse. Locke's social contract is ongoing and conditional: government holds power in trust from the people, who retain the right to withdraw consent if government violates natural rights. Hobbes produces an absolute state; Locke produces a limited, accountable government.