Hobbes and Locke: The Power Debate

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were seventeenth century political philosophers whose different beliefs stemmed from the different contexts in which each man lived.

Hobbes, an aristocrat who lived through the English civil war, had to flee England, watch his monarch’s execution, and observes the violence of human nature at its very worst. Given this experience, his central concern was the need for absolute power to maintain peace and prevent another civil war. On the other hand, John Locke lived and wrote forty years later, after the Glorious Revolution. His ideas developed in the context of a period in which individual’s rights and power were emphasized. He believed that individuals needed freedom from control to reach their full potential. Hobbes became an advocate for absolutism--the belief that because humans are naturally power seeking, a sovereign is needed to maintain peace, and the individual must completely submit to that power. In contrast, Locke advocated constitutionalism, the belief that all individuals have inherit rights, government should be based on consensus, and citizens must fight for their liberty in the face of an overpowering government. These philosophers and their ideas outlined the debate about where power should lie in society–with the individual or with the state.

Although Hobbes and Locke agree that all people are equal, they perceive natural rights and human nature in very different ways. Hobbes believed that people innately love liberty and dominion over others and that men fight due to three “principal causes”: “competition,” which results in men invading for “gain;” “insecurity,” which makes men invade for “safety;” and “glory,” which makes men invade for “reputation.” He states that men are natural...

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... For example, after the September eleventh terrorist attacks on America, citizens became frightened and gave the government more power and sacrificed privacy rights to prevent future attacks. Some people now argue that too much power was sacrificed and now the government has an excessive amount of authority over our lives. It seems that in periods of instability, people let government have more control, but when there is peace and stability, people tend to argue more for individual rights. Neither Hobbes nor Locke was accurately able to represent human nature because neither of them experienced people in both optimistic and pessimistic historical contexts. I believe that the optimal theory would incorporate both ideas about human nature, but how this would be executed in the form of government is something that I and other members of society have failed to recognize.