Politics A: Analysing Theories of the State and Individual - Hobbes and Locke

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Gordon Daniels

Politics A: Analysing Theories of the State and Individual

Hobbes and Locke

John Locke and Thomas Hobbes were two political theorists and philosophers alive in the seventeenth century. Europe had seen the thirty years war that ended in 1648 and was followed by a period of civil wars and revolts in many countries. Most famously in England where a republic was declared and the king executed, war and revolution became a major concern of political theorists. Out of this period came John Locke’s Treaties of Government 1689 and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan 1651. Two theories regarding the role of the state and individual that shared much the same theoretical methodology. The discussion of a hypothetical state of nature and the idea of a social contract in order to achieve a civil society, but despite this their views could not have been more diametrically opposed.

John Locke would be considered a liberal and liberalism was considered a middle class or bourgeoisie movement for freedom from feudal and monarchial control. They were concerned with freedom legal and economic and supported the idea of civil liberties. Locke argued that sovereignty should not reside with the state but with the people. The state had supreme power but only if it was bound by civil law what he called ‘natural law’. He considered all men to be born equal with no innate knowledge only the ability to learn from experience which he referred to as a ‘Tabula Rasa’ or blank slate.

Man had three natural rights life, liberty and private property; these rights were specific rights with corresponding duties to others. Human beings had a right to life, the exception being prisoners of war who in Locke’s opinion could be legitimately enslaved as they acted against the law of nature. For Locke one’s life or body was a form of property, no-one could be the property of someone-else for instance a slave. This right to life was un-negotiable which meant it could not be sold to anyone or ended by anyone. Human beings had a right to the products of their own labour. When a person worked they mixed their labour with raw materials, which therefore became their property. Once a person had appropriated nature in this way, other people had no right to interfere, and the owner had a right to prevent them from doing so. But there was a limitation on this natural right to appropriate nature, to appropriate more than you needed was wrong we had to be aware of others have a social conscience.

 Optimistically some might say Locke saw the state of nature as a state of plenty with enough to go round, and with that in mind we should be able to exist in a state of peace. This was obviously not the case in England as all the land worth cultivating had been claimed and there were many people with no land at all. Locke argued that this was justifiable because wealth of the nation was improved by the labour mixed with the land, that even a landless labourer had better food, clothing and lodging than the king of a large fertile but uncultivated country. It was also thought that those who did not possess land would have to sell their labour to those who had. This meant selling their right to the product of their own labour, which implied they had no property rights and were the tools of others hence losing their rights as citizens and say in government.

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Locke felt if institutions like the state and the legal system were necessary, then it was because a few stupid or evil people insisted on exceeding their natural rights and taking the life and property of others.

To protect against this happening, it was necessary for peace loving respecters of property to organize a state apparatus that would legislate in accordance with natural rights and consequently enforce that legislation. Essentially the task of that state apparatus was to secure a higher level of observance of the law of nature than would occur in its absence. Without such a state ...

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