Hobbes vs Locke: Social Contract Compared

Comparison Overview

Hobbes and Locke are the two foundational figures of the social contract tradition, yet they reached radically different conclusions about the nature of government, the rights of individuals, and the limits of political authority. Both began from the premise that legitimate political authority arises from the consent of individuals who, in a hypothetical state of nature, agree to form a commonwealth. But the state of nature they imagined, the contract they described, and the sovereignty they justified could hardly be more different.

Hobbes, writing in the shadow of the English Civil War, sought to demonstrate that only an absolute sovereign — a Leviathan with virtually unlimited power — could prevent society from collapsing into the war of all against all. Locke, writing forty years later after the Glorious Revolution, sought to justify limited government, natural rights, and the right of revolution. Their disagreement is not merely historical: it continues to define the fault line between authoritarian and liberal conceptions of the state.

Key Differences

The most fundamental difference between Hobbes and Locke concerns the state of nature. For Hobbes, the state of nature is a condition of constant fear and violence. Without a common power to keep them in awe, individuals are driven by competition, diffidence, and glory to attack one another. Life in this condition is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." There are no rights in any meaningful sense — no property, no justice, no injustice — because there is no law and no sovereign to enforce it. The natural right of each individual to preserve themselves by any means necessary is, in practice, the right of all to everything.

For Locke, the state of nature is a condition of freedom and equality, but not of license. It is governed by the law of nature, which reason teaches: no one ought to harm another in their life, health, liberty, or possessions. Individuals in the state of nature have natural rights, including the right to acquire property through labor, and the right to punish those who violate natural law. The problem is not violence but inconvenience: the absence of a settled, known law, an indifferent judge, and an executive power to enforce judgments. Government is created to remedy these inconveniences, not to rescue humanity from a condition of terror.

This difference in the state of nature leads directly to a difference in sovereignty. Hobbes concludes that the only way out of the state of nature is for each individual to surrender their natural right to all things to an absolute sovereign, who is not a party to the contract and therefore cannot be accused of violating it. The sovereign's power is unlimited, indivisible, and irrevocable. Subjects have no right to resist, because resistance would return them to the state of nature, which is worse than any tyranny.

Locke concludes that individuals surrender only the power to punish, not their natural rights. Government is a fiduciary trust, created by consent and limited by the purposes for which it was established. If the government violates its trust — by seizing property without consent, by ruling arbitrarily, or by attempting to enslave the people — the people retain the right to dissolve it and form a new one. The right of revolution is the ultimate safeguard of the Lockean commonwealth.

Hobbes's View

Hobbes's political philosophy, presented in Leviathan (1651), begins with a mechanistic account of human nature. Human beings are driven by appetites and aversions, and the most fundamental of these is the fear of violent death. In the state of nature, where there is no common power, each individual's natural right to self-preservation licenses them to do whatever they judge necessary for their survival. The result is a war of all against all, in which the constant fear of death makes life impossible.

The laws of nature — the rational precepts that forbid doing anything destructive of life — counsel peace. But these laws are merely "convenient articles of peace" that bind only in conscience, not in action, as long as others cannot be trusted to follow them. The only way to achieve security is to erect a common power that can enforce the laws of nature through fear of punishment. This is done through the social contract: each individual agrees to lay down their natural right to all things and to transfer it to a sovereign who will enforce the peace. The sovereign — whether a single person or an assembly — is absolute, meaning that their power cannot be divided, limited, or revoked. Subjects may not resist the sovereign, because the sovereign is not bound by the contract and because any resistance threatens to return everyone to the state of nature.

Hobbes's argument is a masterpiece of deductive reasoning, but its conclusions are deeply unsettling. The sovereign may be a tyrant, but Hobbes insists that even the worst tyranny is preferable to the chaos of civil war. The price of peace is submission, and the only alternative is the war of all against all.

Locke's View

Locke's political philosophy, presented in the Two Treatises of Government (1689), begins from a fundamentally different assessment of human nature and the state of nature. For Locke, the state of nature is governed by a law of nature that obliges everyone to respect the rights of others. The natural rights to life, liberty, and property are not created by government but are inherent in the individual. Property, in particular, is grounded in labor: when a person mixes their labor with unowned natural resources, they acquire a right to the product, subject to the proviso that "enough and as good" is left for others.

The social contract, for Locke, is not a surrender of natural rights but a delegation of the power to enforce them. Individuals consent to form a political society and to establish a government that will protect their rights more effectively than they could themselves. The government's power is limited by the terms of the trust: it may not take property without consent, it must govern by established laws rather than arbitrary decrees, and it must respect the natural rights of the people. The legislative power is supreme, but it is supreme only within the bounds of the trust.

Crucially, Locke argues that the people remain the ultimate judges of whether the government has violated its trust. If the government acts tyrannically, the people may appeal to heaven and exercise their right of revolution. This is not a recipe for perpetual instability, Locke insists, because people will not rebel lightly — they will endure considerable hardship before taking up arms. But the right of revolution is the final guarantor of liberty, and it is this right that distinguishes Lockean constitutionalism from Hobbesian absolutism.

Contemporary Relevance

The Hobbes-Locke debate is not merely a historical curiosity. It encapsulates the central tension of modern political thought: the trade-off between security and liberty. Hobbes's argument that individuals will submit to almost any authority in exchange for security has been invoked to justify authoritarian regimes, from the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century to the security states of the modern era. The Patriot Act, surveillance programs, and emergency powers during crises all raise Hobbesian questions about how much liberty individuals are willing to sacrifice for the promise of safety.

Locke's defense of natural rights, limited government, and the right of revolution, by contrast, provided the philosophical foundation for the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The Lockean idea that government is a limited trust and that the people retain the right to alter or abolish it when it becomes destructive of its ends remains the philosophical backbone of liberal democracy.

In the twenty-first century, the Hobbes-Locke debate continues to structure our thinking about the state. The COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of global terrorism, and the expansion of digital surveillance have all revived Hobbesian anxieties about security. At the same time, concerns about government overreach, the erosion of civil liberties, and the concentration of executive power have given new urgency to Lockean concerns about the limits of authority. The tension between these two visions is unlikely to be resolved, because it reflects a permanent feature of political life: the need to balance the security that only the state can provide against the liberty that the state can also threaten.