Locke believes that through natural law, "nobody can give more power than he has himself, and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give another power over it." (22). Thus, no one person's jurisdiction can extend beyond themselves onto others in nature. Equality here then constrains political power before the existence of any state's authority.
By contrast, Hobbes posits that all humans are equal as they are all equally capable of inflicting violence, which leads to mutual and collective fear. For Hobbes, in the state of nature without government, nothing is inherently unjust, as justice only arises from a common authority's enforcement of it.
This divergence is further evident in their views on the law of nature. For Locke, the law of nature and morality is discoverable through natural reasoning. It commands individuals to refrain from harming others in their life, liberty, or possessions. More importantly, Locke holds that individuals in the state of nature possess the authority to enforce this law, giving them limited executive and judicial power. In this sense, Locke’s state of nature is already a political condition, though not yet a political society.
Hobbes rejects this possibility entirely. The laws of nature in Leviathan are rational strategies for survival, not binding moral rules. Without enforcement, they lack force. This difference explains why Locke, in Two Treatises of Government, can defend natural rights prior to government, while Hobbes insists that rights, law, and ownership only emerge through sovereign power.
Ultimately, Locke and Hobbes offer fundamentally incompatible accounts of political authority and moral obligation. For Locke, equality and natural law impose real limits on power even before the creation of government, making the state of nature a structured moral and political condition rather than a state of pure disorder. Individuals are free, but that freedom is bounded by duties to others that reason itself reveals. Hobbes, by contrast, denies that such moral constraints can exist without enforcement; equality produces fear rather than obligation, and law has no force until a sovereign confers it. The contrast reveals not just different theories of government, but different assumptions about whether moral order precedes power—or is created by it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're all separate but equal

During my tutorial with Dylan yesterday, he brought up the SCOTUS case Brown vs. Board of Education in our discussion of a minimal state. Whilst reading Marx, I realized that both the legal implication (state according rights to individuals) and the societal implication (abolishment of the 'separate but equal' doctrine) of the case are relevant to the claims Marx is making.  Marx delineates between two societies -- political and civil -- and further between the two lives one leads in each -- public and private. In a political society, man is entitled to the liberties given to him by the state, and considers himself a member of a functional community. Marx hints at the mirage of political society, writing that man is “the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality” (34). In such a society, he leads a public life, one in which the state can establish political equality by abolishing “the distinctio...
Read more

What Brettschneider Ought to Admit: Democracy Is Substantive

Although Corey Brettschneider presents his value theory of democracy as a third way between pure proceduralism and outcome-based accounts, his framework collapses into substantivism. Despite insisting that democracy cannot be reduced to “procedure-independent evaluations of outcomes,”(2) he explicitly grounds democratic legitimacy in substantive rights that “limit those policy outcomes that would fail to respect citizens as rulers.” (20). Legitimacy therefore hinges not merely on fair participation but on conformity to three independently specified values—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values operate as external normative standards against which democratic decisions are judged. Brettschneider treats policies such as ex post facto laws or vote buying as democratically illegitimate regardless of procedural authorization, making clear that outcomes remain subject to direct moral assessment. This is not procedural democracy supplemented by rights; it is ...
Read more

'Enough and as Good' for Whom?

 Both Hobbes and Locke describe a state of nature grounded in equality and natural law. Yet, they reach sharply different conclusions about property. Hobbes denies any possibility of owning property in the state of nature. Locke, by contrast, argues that individuals may aquire private property prior to any government by mixing their labor with common resources. By allowing pre-political appropriation, Locke commits himself to moral constraints on ownership.  Locke introduces these limits through two provisos. The Spoiling proviso requires that an individual only claim ownership over land/natural resources to what one can use before it spoils, critizicing waste as a violation of natural law: "Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (21). To me, this limit is relatively clear and intuitive.  More demanding, however, is Locke's second proviso, claiming that appropriation is only legitimate if "enough, and as good" is left in common for others. At first...
Read more