Hobbes and Locke Wrote Two Social Contracts, and America Chose One

Two Englishmen sit down in the seventeenth century and ask the same question: where does government come from? They start from the same place, a world with no government at all. They use the same tool, a contract. They both write in the shadow of civil war. And they arrive at conclusions so far apart that one of them put his name on his book and the other had to publish anonymously.

The difference between them is the difference between a country that can be told what to do and a country that tells its government what to do. America chose. The choice is written into the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and the fastest way to see it is to put the two men side by side.

Two men, one war

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) published Leviathan in 1651. England had just been through a civil war that ended with the trial and execution of King Charles I in January 1649, and the country was without a king. Hobbes had watched authority dissolve and concluded that the worst thing in politics is not tyranny but the absence of any power able to keep the peace.

John Locke (1632-1704) wrote his Two Treatises of Government in the years of the later Stuart crisis, when Charles II and then James II were accused of reaching for absolute power. The work appeared in late 1689, after the Glorious Revolution had driven James II from the throne, and Locke did not put his name on it. Anyone who watched what happened to his friend Algernon Sidney in 1683, a story we tell in Algernon Sidney, the Executed Englishman the Founders Kept Quoting, understood why.

So the first fact about this comparison is that each man's theory was shaped by what he feared. Hobbes feared chaos. Locke feared the crown. Fear is a good teacher and a poor architect, and the Founders spent a long summer in Philadelphia deciding how much of each to build in.

The comparison

Here are the two systems on the five questions that matter, in the philosophers' own terms.

Read down the columns. In the left column every answer ends in the sovereign. In the right column every answer ends in the individual. That is the whole disagreement, and everything else in this post is a footnote to it.

What Hobbes got right

A fair account starts with what the realist saw clearly.

Hobbes understood that rights without enforcement are decoration. A man's life, liberty and property mean little if no one is strong enough to protect them, and a society that cannot stop its own members from preying on each other will not stay free for long. Hobbes's state of nature is a thought experiment, not a history, but it describes something real: the condition of the failed state, the neighbourhood where the police no longer come. Anyone who has studied such places knows that his phrase is not exaggeration.

He also understood that government must be able to act. A sovereign split into a dozen pieces that cannot agree is no sovereign at all. Alexander Hamilton made the same point more than a century later when he argued for a single executive in Federalist 70, which we read closely in Federalist 70 Read Closely, Hamilton's Case for Energy in One Executive, and Federalist 51, usually attributed to James Madison, borrowed the realist's tone: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

So the Founders did not throw Hobbes out. They kept his hard-eyed account of human nature, and they kept his insistence that law needs force behind it. What they rejected was the next step.

Where Hobbes goes wrong

Hobbes asks men to escape the war of all against all by handing everything to one ruler, who is not bound by the deal. He sees the danger, because he knows that the sovereign is also a man. But he waves it away: a sovereign has no reason to harm the people, he says, because his own strength depends on theirs.

Locke answered in one sentence in the Second Treatise that has been repeated by every conservative since. The people who agree to such an arrangement, he wrote, are like men who guard themselves against the mischief of polecats and foxes, and are content, even think it safety, to be devoured by lions. That is chapter VII, section 93, and it is the best joke in the history of political philosophy.

Let us follow the logic one step further than Hobbes's fans do. If the sovereign cannot do his subjects wrong, because he is the source of what counts as wrong, then there is no such thing as a tyrant, only a ruler whose laws you do not like. The man in the cell has no complaint, since the cell is lawful. A theory that cannot name the evil it should prevent has not solved the problem of government. It has renamed it.

Locke's alternative, in five premises

Locke's position can be laid out as an argument.

1. Men are by nature free and equal, and bound by a law of nature. In chapter II he states that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. The state of nature is not lawless; it is lawful without a referee.
2. The trouble is the lack of a neutral judge. Each man is judge in his own case, which makes the state of nature inconvenient, as he puts it, and pushes people toward government.
3. Government is therefore a remedy for an inconvenience and not a gift of power. Men give up the right to judge and punish for themselves, and they do so only to secure their lives, liberties and estates better.
4. What was entrusted for a purpose cannot be used against that purpose. A ruler who takes the people's property or liberty at will has turned the remedy back into the disease.
5. When that happens the trust is forfeit. The people may resist and, if need be, replace the government. Locke wrote of an "appeal to heaven", meaning that when there is no earthly judge, the people must be the judge.

Notice the structure. Government is made by consent, serves a stated purpose and ends when it betrays the purpose. We examine that consent idea in Consent of the Governed Was a Precise Idea in Locke, Not a Slogan, and we cover his labour theory of property in Locke Said Property Begins the Moment Your Labor Mixes With the Earth.

The steelman for Hobbes

Before we say which side won, the best case for the other side deserves a hearing.

Hobbes's defenders argue that Locke is naive about the state of nature and about the consequences of resistance. If the people may judge when the government has broken its trust, then who judges the people? Every faction will claim the trust has been broken, and every coup will call itself an appeal to Heaven. A right of revolution, they say, is a standing invitation to civil war, and civil war is precisely what Hobbes lived through. Better to accept a government that is sometimes oppressive than to license the cure that is worse than the disease. The monarch who is occasionally harsh is preferable to the mob that is permanently angry.

That is a serious objection, and history has plenty of failed revolutions to support it. The French in 1789 and the Russians in 1917 can be summoned as witnesses.

The answer to the steelman

The rebuttal has four parts.

One: Locke does not license casual revolt. He says explicitly that people are slow to rebel and that long custom does not change quickly. The Declaration echoes him: "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Prudence is built into the right.

Two: the answer to "who judges" is institutions built beforehand. This is where the American Constitution improves on Locke. It supplies elections, courts, a written text and an amending process so that a people need not choose between submission and rebellion. The right of revolution stays in reserve while a thousand lesser remedies do the daily work. Locke supplied the principle; Madison and the Convention supplied the machinery.

Three: absolute power has a worse record than limited power. The twentieth century gave us governments that held every power Hobbes recommended and killed their own citizens by the millions. No one can prove that any one of them was a Hobbesian state, but all of them show what happens when no one outside the sovereign is allowed to say no.

Four: Hobbes's peace is not liberty. A country can be quiet and unfree. The question is not only whether order exists, but whether it serves a people who retain rights. Hobbes gives order and asks nothing of it. Locke gives order and sets terms.

What America took from each

The Declaration reads like Locke's argument in a thousand words. "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." Rights come first. Government is instituted to secure them. Its powers are "just" only if consented to. The people may abolish it. You could lay those sentences next to chapters VIII, IX and XIX of the Second Treatise and see them match. We read the paragraph in full in The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government.

The Constitution, written eleven years later, took the Hobbesian lesson that Locke needed a sturdier frame. The Founders gave the national government real power to tax, to raise armies and to enforce its laws, because the Articles of Confederation had shown what a government without teeth does. Then they surrounded that power with every check they could invent: separated branches, a bicameral legislature, enumerated powers, a Bill of Rights. Montesquieu's warning that liberty perishes where one hand makes and enforces the law, covered in Montesquieu Warned That Liberty Dies Where One Hand Makes and Enforces Law, did the rest. Federalist 47 put the matter in a sentence we explore in Federalist 47 Defines Tyranny as All Powers Gathered Into the Same Hands.

So the scoreboard is this. On the question of why government exists, the answer is Locke's. On the question of how much strength it must have, the answer is partly Hobbes's. On the question of whom the government answers to, the answer is Locke's again, as every election reminds us.

Why it matters at the kitchen table

This is not a seminar topic. Every modern argument over government's reach is an argument between the two columns in that table.

When a bureaucracy tells a family what it may build on its own land, or which doctor it may see, or what words it must say, someone is claiming Hobbes's premise: the sovereign defines the sphere of your liberty. When a citizen answers that his rights were there first, he is quoting Locke. When a regulator says the agency's judgment cannot be questioned because the agency is the expert, he is the sovereign who cannot be wronged. Our discussion of the rule-of-law test lawmakers keep failing, in The Rule of Law Has Eight Marks, and Lawmakers Can Fail at Every One, gives the citizen a checklist.

And when a politician says the people have spoken and therefore nothing may restrain the majority, he has swapped one sovereign for another. The Founders, who read both authors, would ask the same question of the majority that Locke asked of the king: is it bound by the law, or is it the law?

The case in brief

1. Hobbes and Locke begin in the same state of nature and end at opposite places: an absolute sovereign for Hobbes, a limited trustee for Locke.
2. Hobbes was right that rights need enforcement and government needs force, and the Founders kept both lessons.
3. He was wrong that the sovereign cannot wrong the subject, because that theory cannot even name tyranny; Locke's polecat-and-lion line is the answer.
4. The Declaration took Locke's rights, consent and right to abolish; the Constitution added Hobbes's strength and Montesquieu's checks.
5. The live question in every dispute over government's reach is still which column of the table you stand in.

What you can do: read the second paragraph of the Declaration aloud at your next family dinner, then ask which of its clauses a Hobbesian government would refuse.