Locke vs Rousseau — How Do They Differ on Society?

Quick Answer

Locke and Rousseau are the two most influential social contract theorists after Hobbes, and their disagreement over the nature of society, freedom, and legitimate government has shaped modern political thought from the American and French Revolutions to contemporary debates about democracy and rights. Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), argued that individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property prior to the establishment of government. The state of nature is a condition of relative peace governed by natural law, but it lacks an impartial judge to settle disputes, so individuals consent to form a government whose sole purpose is to protect those pre-existing rights. If government oversteps this trust, the people retain the right of revolution.

Rousseau, in his Discourse on Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762), told a dramatically different story. He agreed with Locke that individuals are naturally free but argued that the invention of private property and the development of civilization had corrupted that natural freedom, producing inequality, dependence, and the domination of the poor by the rich. Society as it exists is not a mutual protection pact but a fraud by which the powerful legitimate their advantage. The question Rousseau posed — and that Locke never asked — is how individuals can be forced to be free, how a legitimate social order can be constructed that does not merely reproduce the injustices of the existing one.

Rousseau's answer is the social contract understood as the collective surrender of each individual's particular will to the general will (volonte generale) — the will that aims at the common good of the whole community. By submitting to the general will, each person becomes a citizen rather than a subject, and the freedom they seem to lose by giving up their private desires is replaced by a higher, moral freedom: obedience to a law one has prescribed to oneself as a member of the sovereign people. Locke's contract preserves individual rights against the state; Rousseau's contract dissolves the individual into the collective and makes the state the expression of the popular sovereign. These are not minor variations but fundamentally different visions of what society is for and what freedom means.

Historical Context

Social contract theory emerged in the seventeenth century as a rival to the divine right of kings and the patriarchal theory of political authority. Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), had argued that the state of nature is a condition of perpetual fear and violence — the "war of all against all" — in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Rational individuals, seeking self-preservation, contract to surrender their natural liberty to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security. Hobbes's contract is an exchange of freedom for safety, and the sovereign's power is, with few exceptions, absolute and irrevocable.

Locke wrote in direct response to Hobbes, though he addressed the argument more obliquely. In the Second Treatise (1689), Locke argued that the state of nature is not a state of war but a condition of freedom and equality governed by the law of nature, which reason teaches: no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty, or possessions. Individuals in the state of nature have natural rights, including the right to acquire property through their labor and the right to punish those who violate natural law. The inconvenience of the state of nature is not its violence but the absence of a settled, known law; an indifferent judge; and an executive power to enforce judgments. Government is established by consent to remedy these inconveniences, and its power is limited to the purposes for which it was created. If it exceeds those limits, the people may dissolve it and form a new one. Locke's contract is thus a limited delegation of power, not a surrender of natural rights, and it provided the philosophical foundation for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and, a century later, for the American Declaration of Independence.

Rousseau, writing in the 1750s and 1760s, turned the tradition on its head. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755), he argued that Hobbes and Locke had both mistaken the effects of civilization for the nature of the human being. The true state of nature, Rousseau claimed, was one of solitary, self-sufficient individuals with few needs, no language, no property, and no moral relations — a condition of innocence rather than violence or commerce. The invention of agriculture and private property introduced scarcity, competition, and dependence: the person who first enclosed a piece of land and said "this is mine" was, Rousseau wrote, the true founder of civil society, and the inequalities that follow are artificial, not natural. Existing societies, far from being legitimate contracts among equals, are ruses by which the rich persuade the poor to legitimate the very arrangements that oppress them.

Philosophical Perspectives

The deepest philosophical difference between Locke and Rousseau concerns the relationship between the individual and the community. Locke's political philosophy is fundamentally individualistic: the individual is prior to society, possesses natural rights that society does not create and cannot justly violate, and enters into political association only to protect those rights more effectively. The social contract is a bargain among property-owning individuals who retain their rights and their private judgment. Government is a fiduciary trust, and sovereignty ultimately resides in the people, not because the people are a collective body with a general will, but because each individual retains the natural right to judge whether the government has fulfilled its trust.

Rousseau's philosophy is communitarian in a radical sense. The individual as a private person, with particular interests and desires, is precisely what must be overcome for legitimate society to exist. The social contract requires each person to "alienate" their particular will to the general will — not to another person or to a government, but to the whole community, of which they remain a part. The general will is not the will of all (the aggregate of private interests) but the will that aims at the common good, and it is always right when properly expressed. The citizen who refuses to obey the general will "shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free" — the most famous and most controversial sentence in The Social Contract. This is not tyranny, Rousseau argues, because the general will is what the citizen would will if they were thinking clearly about the common good rather than their private advantage.

The two thinkers also define freedom differently. For Locke, freedom is negative liberty — the absence of arbitrary interference by others with one's person, property, and lawful pursuits. The free person is the one who is not subject to the will of another, and government is legitimate insofar as it protects this negative liberty. For Rousseau, negative liberty is insufficient and even misleading: the person who is free from interference but enslaved to their own desires and to social conventions is not truly free. Moral freedom consists in obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself, and the only way to prescribe the law to oneself in society is through participation in the general will. Freedom, for Rousseau, is not the absence of constraint but the presence of self-government — autonomy in the literal sense of giving the law to oneself.

The question of property divides them sharply. Locke grounded property rights in labor: when a person mixes their labor with unowned natural resources, they acquire a natural right to the product, subject to the proviso that "enough and as good" is left for others. Property is natural, pre-political, and a primary purpose of government is to protect it. Rousseau saw property as the original source of inequality and social corruption: the first person who claimed to own a piece of land and found others naive enough to believe him became the founder of a social order built on fraud and domination. The Social Contract does not abolish property but subordinates it to the general will, which determines the conditions of ownership and the limits of inequality.

Modern Reflection

The Locke-Rousseau debate continues to structure contemporary political philosophy. Liberal theories of justice, from John Rawls's A Theory of Justice to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, operate within the Lockean framework of individual rights, consent, and limited government. Rawls's veil of ignorance, which asks what principles of justice rational agents would choose behind a screen that hides their particular social position, is a descendant of the social contract tradition that owes as much to Rousseau's concern for equality as to Locke's concern for rights. Communitarian critics of liberalism, such as Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, echo Rousseau's insight that the unencumbered self of liberal theory is a fiction and that individuals are constituted by the communities and traditions in which they are embedded.

The tension between individual rights and collective self-government remains live in democratic politics. Locke's emphasis on natural rights as constraints on what majorities may do underlies constitutional protections of free speech, religious liberty, and due process. Rousseau's emphasis on popular sovereignty and the general will underlies the democratic aspiration that the people should govern themselves rather than be governed by elites, courts, or markets. The difficulty — visible in every constitutional democracy — is reconciling the two: protecting individual rights that majorities might violate while ensuring that the people remain the ultimate source of legitimate authority. Neither Locke nor Rousseau fully solved this problem, but the terms they established remain the framework within which we grapple with it.

Rousseau's critique of inequality and his diagnosis of the corrupting effects of social comparison also resonate powerfully in an age of growing economic disparity and social media. His insight that the desire for recognition — what he called amour-propre, the restless need to be esteemed by others — can enslave individuals to public opinion and destroy their natural self-sufficiency anticipates contemporary anxieties about conformity, status anxiety, and the loss of authentic selfhood. Locke's defense of toleration and limited government, by contrast, remains the philosophical backbone of liberal democracy's response to authoritarianism. The two thinkers, taken together, define the permanent tension at the heart of modern political life.

Related Thinkers

• John Locke — argued in the Second Treatise of Government that government exists to protect natural rights to life, liberty, and property, established by consent and limited by its trust
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — argued in The Social Contract that legitimate government requires submission to the general will and that society corrupts natural freedom
• Thomas Hobbes — provided the foundational social contract theory in Leviathan, arguing that the state of nature is a war of all against all and that absolute sovereignty is the price of security

Related Quotes

• "Wherever law ends, tyranny begins." — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
• "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
• "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine'... was the real founder of civil society." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality
• "The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Locke's Political Philosophy." A comprehensive account of natural rights, consent, property, and the right of revolution.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau." A thorough treatment of the social contract, the general will, and the critique of inequality.
3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Hobbes." A detailed reference covering the state of nature, the social contract, and absolute sovereignty.
4. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract." An accessible overview of Rousseau's political philosophy and the concept of the general will.