It seems somehow self-evident that “the state of nature”- or natural laws, are meant as a guide-post to how men should conduct themselves in harmony or opposition to others. Hobbes, in an earlier century, has little hope that men are totally able to find a political solution by themselves. They require a strong leader, a sovereign who supposedly has the best interests of his subjects at heart. We know, of course, from history that this was (and is) wishful thinking. Locke gives people more credit, but also has a restraining hold on what one might call “total” freedom. He expands on both Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s idea of a “contract”, more political here than social.
Locke believes that men, naturally, are in “a state of perfect freedom….within the bounds of the laws of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man” (Locke 8). Locke sees this state as being one of equality where all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal. In a sense, this might even be considered the perfect form of communism, whereby everyone receives back whatever it is he contributes.
At the same time, Locke differentiates between “liberty” and “licence” (sic). Locke goes further here than most others who discuss the rights and obligations of the governed and those who govern by literally damning those who would seek to harm others and deprive them of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He somehow brings religion into it (given the times in which he wrote, this seems appropriate for mass consumption) when he explains that we are “all the servants of one master” (Locke 9).
There is one sentence in this segment of Locke’s treatise that deserves attention by modern world leaders (something all too often ignored or overlooked): “…all men may be restrained from invading others rights and from doing hurt to one another, and the law of nature be observed which willeth the preservation of all mankind” (Locke 9).
Hobbes, on the other hand, seems to indicate that man has every right to defend himself as a means of self-preservation. There is no talk here of reciprocity. “…every man has a right to everything except another man’s body” (Hobbes 86). Hobbes sees this as a form of “preservation of his own nature” (86). If one reads the difference here between the two men it might be that Hobbes sees man’s life and security as “his own castle” worth defending at any cost, while Locke is more kindly disposed toward the nature of man by claiming that he gets back as good as he gives. In modern idiom we might consider this a sort of “what goes around comes around” form of philosophy.
Hobbes invokes the Golden Rule in his understanding of liberty: that the liberty one man desires for himself should also serve as the sort of liberty someone else can claim for himself and no one has a right, by definition of the laws of nature, for anyone to take away that personal liberty, UNLESS (so I understand it) an action is initiated that tries to take away one’s liberty first.
Hobbes also refers to covenants. They are promises made which are to be kept unless released from such obligations. In a sense, this is closer to Locke’s theory of reciprocity. However, when it comes to applying justice, the two men have a distinctly different approach. Hobbes seems more akin to current systems of justice when he writes about finding a sort of arbitrator for disputes: “if he perform his trust….and this is indeed just distribution, and may be called….more properly equity” (Hobbes 93). While Locke sees each man as his own judge and executioner: “every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature” (Locke 10). Locke, however, tempers his development of the laws of nature by making certain one understands that it is a law only when it becomes enforceable, and that everyone has the power to enforce such laws of nature- as long as no law threatens the existence of anyone.
While both men obviously see the laws of nature as stemming not from the people themselves but from some higher power, Locke has much more faith in the individual, with some reservations, than does Locke who favors a strong sovereign-led form of government. Part of the difference in the visions of these two men can be seen in the times in which they lived. Hobbes, of course, lived from the reign of an aging Elizabeth I, through two Tudors and Cromwell. He saw the obvious ruin to both his homeland as well as to its political strengths by the ineptness of the two kings and their usurpation by Cromwell. To Hobbes, royalty was a far more acceptable status quo than roundheads. Locke was more of a revolutionary, especially in his service to Shaftsbury who opposed much of Charles II’s efforts and was jailed during the Whig Revolution while Locke himself fled to Holland. There is one phrase in this second Treatise which surely resounds centuries later: his mention of “the dignity of man” (13). Surely this evidenced in the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as well as in France’s Rights of Man. Hobbes, surely, would have sided with the Bourbons.
Nevertheless, it would be fair to assume that neither man had total faith in the ability of man to govern himself and thus to move ahead to a life of liberty and justice for all. While Locke’s natural laws included the dichotomy of guilt vs. innocence, justice vs. injustice, and liberty vs. license, Hobbes was in the covenants and contracts man made which were to be honored and overseen by some arbitrator based on merit. It seems fairly reasonable to assume that this arbitrator would not be what American justice would call a “jury of one’s peers.” They must “submit” (95) to an arbitrator. “Submit” is a word n not found in Locke’s thesis. Hobbes makes this quite clear, whether he refers to God or to some sovereign, when he claims that “men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deal of grief) in keeping company where there is no power unable to overawe them all” (Hobbes 85). Can one hastily surmise here that an Englishman would prefer a status where he would be overawed by royalty beholden to a specific religion, rather than to a Cromwell who is far too “ordinary” (if that is fair to Cromwell).
Locke actually carries the idea of submission in a slightly different direction: his idea is that men will “put themselves under government (for) the preservation of their property” (Locke 66). Locke sees men giving up certain things in order to preserve their property. Punishing, for one thing. We are no longer in a world of forced arbitration by some powerful sovereign, we are now seeing that a union of like-minded men need to cede some of their personal and individual liberties in order to form that “more perfect union” and literally divest themselves of certain individual tasks which a government could do better and perhaps more effectively. We live in a civil society, so Locke proclaims, in which government- at its optimum, only exists to protect property and adjudicate disputes. Locke also seems to give citizens the right to revoke that authority when it is either too powerful and all-consuming or, in a modern idiom, “unfair.”
It may be a little too simplistic, but one can see that a major difference in how Locke and Hobbes see government functions is that Hobbes states that man must cede certain rights to the government in order for his idea of a “contract” or covenant. Locke, on the other hand, offers a more or less “lending” of certain powers but with the ability to revoke that contract if the government fails to act on its promises. This very idea, a century later, became part of the preamble to the American Constitution: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary…” The dissolution in the American Constitution’s preamble is the sort of retraction of the contract Locke proposed can be initiated if government fails to act in the best interests of the governed. It is what Locke refers to as “the consent of the governed.” The Americans who developed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution adhered to Locke’s idea that man has a right to “freedom from absolute, arbitrary power” (Locke 17).
Can the retraction of this contract between citizens and their government lead to revolution? During Hobbes’ era it had, in fact, turned England into a Puritan battleground. Locke, whose mentor was a leader in opposition to the king, also felt that there was a need for revolution.
Locke focuses on the preservation of man’s property as a means of opposing, even rising up against otherwise established authority: “Governments are dissolved from within…when the legislative is altered…” (Locke 107). Prior to Locke’s time there was no such event as a peaceful transition of government, as in the U.S. a century later, from one political party or individual bloc to another. So, there was a sort of royal continuity and a Parliament that followed certain legislative rules for the benefit of the governed. When that government fails to live up to its rules, then Locke presumes the people have a right to rise up and change that legislative form of government until it once again is based on its basic law of nature: the preservation of private property and the safeguarding of its citizens. One might claim, however, that Locke tends to see this sort of revolution as a politico/economic one which must be justified. An uprising, therefore, is justified by Locke when there is a “misuse of power” (Locke 108). This might consist of what Locke refers to as an alteration of the uses of power of a sovereign and they conflict with the will and needs of the people, an uprising is justified.
What are some reasons where rebellion or revolution might be justified? Locke writes about “breach of trust” (112). He makes a disclaimer that his hypothesis would lead to frequent rebellion, “Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur (113(. But, if a long train of abuses occurs, then Locke believes people should rouse themselves and create a government which eliminates lies and abuses and inequitable laws.
It is this basis for considering revolution to be in the interests of the majority of people that obviously set the tone for the Americans a century later. It was not the tax on tea, or conscription, or a tax on newsprint and pamphlets, or the occupation by foreign troops individually, but the accumulation of these activities which turned the American colonists into revolutionaries.
Locke is not espousing armed conflict as much as he is advocating the return of the legislative process to the people who gave up some rights in return for it when a given term for that legislature expires: “…at the time set, it reverts to the society, and the people have a right to act as supreme, and continue the legislative in themselves; or erect a new form…” (Locke 124). It goes without saying that those who wrote our Constitution took Locke to heart, and created that new form- a representative republic unlike- even to this day- any other form of government quite like it: a government in which citizens have inherent rights to accept or change things they feel are wrong.
WORKS CITED:
Hobbes, Thomas: “Leviathan” Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 23 Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1956)
Locke, John (ed. Macpherson, C.B.): Second Treatise of Government Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Co. (1980)
