history question

E book P547 Social Contract Theory: Hobbes and Locke

Social Contract Theory: Hobbes and Locke

Out of the turmoil of the English revolutions came a major rethinking of the foundations of all political authority. Although Thomas Hobbes and John Locke wrote in response to the upheavals of their times, they offered opposing arguments that were applicable to any place and any time, not just England of the seventeenth century. Hobbes justified absolute authority; Locke provided the rationale for constitutionalism. Yet both argued that all authority came not from divine right but from a social contract among citizens.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was a royalist who sat out the English civil war of the 1640s in France, where he tutored the future king Charles II. Returning to England in 1651, Hobbes published his masterpiece, Leviathan, in which he argued for unlimited authority in a ruler. Absolute authority could be vested in either a king or a parliament; it had to be absolute, Hobbes insisted, in order to overcome the defects of human nature. Believing that people are essentially self-centered and driven by the “right to self-preservation,” Hobbes made his case by referring to science, not religion. To Hobbes, human life in a state of nature — that is, any situation without firm authority — was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Only the assurance of social order could make people secure enough to act according to law; consequently, giving up personal liberty, he maintained, was the price of collective security. Rulers derived their power, he concluded, from a contract in which absolute authority protects people’s rights.

Hobbes’s notion of rule by an absolute authority left no room for political dissent or nonconformity, and it infuriated both royalists and supporters of Parliament. He enraged his fellow royalists by arguing that authority came not from divine right but from the social contract. Parliamentary supporters resisted Hobbes’s claim that rulers must possess absolute authority to prevent the greater evil of anarchy. Like Machiavelli before him, Hobbes became associated with a cynical, pessimistic view of human nature, and future political theorists often began their arguments by refuting Hobbes.

Rejecting both Hobbes and the more traditional royalist defenses of absolute authority, John Locke (1632–1704) used the notion of a social contract to provide a foundation for constitutionalism. Locke experienced political life firsthand as physician, secretary, and intellectual companion to the earl of Shaftesbury, a leading English Whig. In 1683, during the Exclusion Crisis, Locke fled with Shaftesbury to the Dutch Republic. There he continued work on his Two Treatises of Government, which, when published in 1690, served to justify the revolution of 1688. Locke’s position was thoroughly anti-absolutist. He denied the divine right of kings and ridiculed the common royalist idea that political power in the state mirrored the father’s authority in the family. Like Hobbes, he posited a state of nature that applied to all people. Unlike Hobbes, however, he thought people were reasonable and the state of nature peaceful.

Locke insisted that government’s only purpose was to protect life, liberty, and property, a notion that linked economic and political freedom. Ultimate authority rested in the will of a majority of men who owned property, and government should be limited to its basic purpose of protection. A ruler who failed to uphold his part of the social contract between the ruler and the populace could be justifiably resisted, an idea that would become crucial for the leaders of the American Revolution a century later. For England’s seventeenth-century landowners, however, Locke helped validate a revolution that consolidated their interests and ensured their privileges in the social hierarchy.

Document 16.4: John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690)

4. The Consent of the Governed

John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690)

Hobbes’s fellow Englishman John Locke (1632–1704) likewise viewed the tumults of his day with a critical eye. Although the English civil war ended with the restoration of Charles II to the throne, new troubles loomed. Charles openly sympathized with Catholics, as did his brother and heir, James II. Fearful of the ties between Catholicism and French absolutism, in 1678 Parliament denied the right of a Catholic to inherit the crown. Charles resisted this move, sparking a succession crisis. Locke fled to the Dutch Republic in 1683 with his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who opposed a Catholic monarch. While abroad, Locke worked on his Two Treatises of Government, which he published upon his return to England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A selection from the Second Treatise follows. As it reveals, although Locke shared Hobbes’s interest in the origins of civil society, his anti-absolutist stance stood in sharp contrast to Hobbes’s position. For Locke, ultimate authority rests in the will of the majority of propertied men who, in exchange for protection, endow the state with the authority to rule over them. Yet this power is not limitless. Just as the majority grants the state its power, so too can it justifiably resist it if it fails to fulfill its part of the social contract.

Of the Beginning of Political Societies

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.…

And thus every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation, to every one of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original compact, whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify nothing, and be no compact, if he be left free, and under no other ties than he was in before in the state of nature. For what appearance would there be of any compact? what new engagement if he were no farther tied by any decrees of the society, than he himself thought fit, and did actually consent to? This would be still as great a 

From John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, at www.ilt.columbia.edu/aca-demic/digitexts/locke/second/locke2nd.txt.

This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeQ2: RESPONSE ARGUMENT, ANALYSIS, CONTENT : Answered all portions of the prompt fully, with a specific argument and details/examples included. Response contains accurate information (few to no errors) and demonstrates a strong understanding of the period, concepts, and events at hand.

This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeQ2: SOURCE USE: A minimum of three primary and two secondary sources utilized specifically and efficiently for support. Quotations are analyzed and effectively incorporated as part of the analysis. All source use appropriately and accurately cited.