Hobbes, Locke and the State of Nature

Abstract

Hobbes and Locke differ over the state of nature. In Hobbes the state of nature is a state of generalized insecurity. Each person runs the risk of losing everything, and each person has the right of taking anything—another’s life, possessions—whatever seems a help to his own self-preservation and prosperity. In Locke, as Simmons points out,1 it is not easy to say all at once and briefly what the state of nature is. Many different states of nature are recognized. Not all are violent. Not all discourage productive labour. Not all permit wholesale violations in practice of natural law. Not all exist in the absence of some sort of authority or order. Instead, there are a whole range of states of nature, unified not by a set of inconveniences, but by the fact that people stand outside a legitimate political order. It is often thought that Locke’s theory of the state of nature (and of government) not only differs systematically from Hobbes’s, but that it was arrived at in opposition to Hobbes’s. This seems unlikely, for reasons given long ago by Laslett.2 Locke could not be clearer that his target in the Two Treatises is Filmer. And though Filmer’s theory of political power supports a kind of absolutism, as does Hobbes’s, it is Filmer’s sort of absolutism, patriarchal absolutism, and not Hobbes’s, that is at issue.3 Even if the Two Treatises are not directed at Hobbes, they are comparable to Hobbes’s political writings in this respect: they can be understood as having a message for people who believe they are under tyranny and want to escape it. The message of Hobbes’s political treatises is that, unless it puts people at risk of immediate death, they act unjustly if they try to escape or resist tyranny, since