Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were two of the most important political philosophers of the modern era. While their theories were different in many respects, they jointly laid the ground for modern liberalism, modern political philosophy, and modern political economy. Hobbes’s greatest contribution was his innovative framework and concepts such as the state of nature, indivisible sovereign rights vested in civil authority, and the idea that an all-powerful political authority could be created by men rather than by God. Hobbes argued that the natural state of men was a state of all against all, as everyone would have the right to use all and any means for self-preservation, where everyone would have the right to everything. From this, he argued that it was natural for men to desire peace and that any form of government capable of preserving peace was better than civil war. He called for the creation of the Leviathan, an omnipotent, sovereign, civil, political power that was the only form of government capable of preventing civil war. Citizens in Hobbes’s commonwealth were subjects who voluntarily gave up almost all of their power and rights (aside from the right to self-preservation) to create the Leviathan because any form of peace was preferable to the war of all against all. In short, Hobbes argued that, without an omnipotent sovereign, political power, society could not exist.
Locke completely rejected Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature. For him, the state of nature was a benign, perfect political society without any drawbacks. It’s a society where every offense was punished according to the natural law, which meant that there was a common law and all punishments were impartial and fair. Every law, because all laws in the state of nature were natural laws, was intuitive and intelligible to all members of society. In the state of nature, no one was subject to the arbitrary and unjust will of other humans, because everyone was subject to the natural law and natural law only. Locke’s state of nature was an inversion of Hobbes’s state of nature. Rather than a murderous free for all, it was a society of free and voluntary associations, which, in Hobbes’s framework, was anti-political.
In Locke’s conception, political society emerged because men are not perfectly rational creatures. According to Locke, the natural condition, while rational and intelligible, was also full of dangers to men. Men, because of the anxiety inspired by continuous dangers, were not able to interpret natural laws rationally and were impelled to form civil societies that could better alleviate their anxieties and fears. In contrast with Hobbes, Locke’s political society was built upon the common anxiety inspired by the state of nature and, implicitly, nature itself, while Hobbes’s Leviathan was inspired by the common fear of civil war, which was man-made. As a solution, Locke’s political society aims to imitate the state of nature, which was rejected by men because of their weakness and anxiety rather than the defects of the state of nature. Hence, its priority for Locke was to recreate an impartial society by creating a set of common laws, an impartial judiciary, and an executive system. Conquering nature was never part of political liberalism, probably because it was pessimistic in intellectual temperament.
In a way, Locke flipped the script of Hobbes on its head (and probably the script of most political philosophers before the modern era). While Hobbes theorized that society could not exist without a sovereign, civil power keeping internal and external peace, Locke argued that an ideal state of society that’s also the ideal political society existed before any man-made government. The ideal society was only corrupted because men were not perfectly rational and prone to anxieties caused by dangers posed by the state of nature. This anxiety corrupted men and impelled them to form political societies that could alleviate their anxiety and fear of nature and the dangers nature posed. However, because men moved away from the state of nature out of their weakness and did not reject the voluntary ideal, all political societies were fundamentally imitations of the state of nature. Legitimacy, then, lay with the society, which created political society to rediscover its ideal state in the state of nature. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, men move from the state of nature, which was a state of perpetual war, toward a state of peace, by forming a social contract with each other to give almost all their rights and power to a sovereign power to guarantee peace among them. They moved from a very undesirable state of nature, which was full of war, to a much more desirable, peaceful political society, and they gave up their power directly to the Leviathan, a political institution.
In Locke’s political society, men formed a social contract and gave up their rights and power to the society, and the society put the power in the hands of the institution and people it judged appropriate. However, when a government no longer performed or came into conflict with society, power naturally reverted to society. Locke’s men, in contrast to Hobbes’s men, moved from the ideal state (state of nature) to a corrupted state (state of nature where men felt anxiety due to the danger posed by nature), to an imitation of the ideal state, which was the political society. Moreover, they never gave up their rights and powers to a political institution, but to society itself. Hence, for Locke, legitimacy resided in society rather than political institutions. Aside from the debate on whether any of this was historically accurate (they are not), Locke took the legitimacy out of political institutions and political philosophy and put it into society and social science, or provided the justification for it in the long run. Locke also, arguably, cemented the anti-political nature of liberalism and pushed it into the synthesis with economics, particularly with his study of private property.
John Locke’s biggest contribution to the study of political economy was his innovative notion of private property, which was composed of three elements. One, Locke argued that physical labor transformed unproductive land into the private property of the laborer, paving the way for the labor theory of value and the argument that individuals own the fruit of their labor, the former eventually leading to Marxist economic theory, while the latter to Marx’s revolutionary theory. Two, Locke argued that private property was not a political institution, as postulated by Hobbes, but a social institution dependent on social recognition. Three, Locke argued that private property was the foundation of the political order and the instrument for eliciting the tacit consent of the people for the social contract. When people exercised property rights, Locke argued, people also gave implicit and tacit consent to the existing political system, which guaranteed the exercise of property rights they utilized. This also was a bulwark against radicalism. A popular argument of the time was that, because different generations faced different difficulties, had different desires, and different circumstances, they should be allowed to form different institutions and deal with the situation in their way. However, by inheriting the private property of the previous generation, the subsequent generation gave implicit consent to the existing political order. Changes were still possible. It just had to come through the existing system, rather than revolution.