Comparing Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, And Karl Marx

The 17th and 18th century was a time in which more and more nations were straying away from monarchies and beginning to learn about and understand new forms of government. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Karl Marx were all three philosophical thinkers who believed in different political and social rights for humans. Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century English thinker, argued that people were naturally cruel, greedy, and selfish. He wrote his ideas in his work, Leviathan. He was concerned about the social and political order. Since at the time he lived, there were many politically vulnerable and unstable countries. This time period sparked Hobbes to believe that there should be one strong ruler, or an absolute monarch, to keep a country secure and stable. Since

He said that people were full of moral and reason and we were born with these special rights called “natural rights.” Natural rights are rights that belonged to all humans from birth that include the right to life, liberty, and property. Locke supported his views with his work, Two Treatises of Government. In this work, he argued that governments were formed to protect the natural rights of humans. He believed that the best government was the kind that was accepted by all the citizens and did not hold all the power. Thus, he disagreed with Hobbes because he did not believe in an absolute monarchy. Locke insisted that if a government failed to protect the rights of the people it governs, then the citizens could overthrow that government. The reason Locke thought that humans naturally contained moral and reason is because he had the theory that our acquisition of knowledge consisted of a special kind of relationship between ideas and experiences, which we are able to combine in numerous different ways. Two hundred years after Locke and Hobbes, a German philosopher named Karl Marx created an idea of socialism in which he predicted a struggle between social classes would lead to a