What are the differences between Locke’s and Hobbes’ notions of the “state of nature”?
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published 11/04/2007
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SummaryThomas Hobbes and John Locke are probably the most famous political thinkers of the 17th century. The generally accepted view asserts that these authors stood poles apart, the first one advocating an absolutist regime and the latter recommending a stable civil society where powers are separated. But their methodological demonstration follows the same pattern and Locke shares with Hobbes the same initial assumption: They indeed both suppose that the correct way to tackle questions about the grounds of political obligation is by performing a thought-experiment: the description of the state of nature. They thus imagine a state of nature where individuals live in abstraction from all political institutions and superior control. Hobbes first expressed his conception of the state of nature in his most famous political masterpiece, the Leviathan published in 1651. John Locke further explored it in his Second Treatise on Civil Government written in the wake of England's Glorious Revolution of 1688. Devoid of any ultimate moral values, the Hobbesian “natural condition of mankind” seems to differ from the regulated state of nature guided by human Reason. And even if Locke’s philosophy sometimes seems to be rooted in Hobbes’ principles, we will see that their accounts of the imagined state of nature are sharply different. We’ll thus try to compare Hobbes’s and Locke’s visions of the state of nature, regarding their nature, their essence, and their purpose regarding their conceptions of political power.
Table of Contents
- Two strongly divergent views of human nature
- Preliminary remarks on the concept of the state of nature
- A dissimilar account of the state of nature in its initial form: two different behavioral analyses
- The essence and the role of the law of nature in the state of nature also differ
- State of nature/state of war
- The opposed evolution of their state of nature leads to two different remedies
- Two dissimilar degrees of development
- A different exit from the state of nature: Whereas Hobbes advocates a radical break, Locke underlines the necessary continuity between the state of nature and civil society
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