Hobbes
Essay title: Hobbes
Hobbes
No one has masterfully argued that people are essentially estranged as Thomas Hobes, the mordant and witty English philosopher. The natural human state, Hobbes maintained, is one of war “of every man, against every man.” Where there is no strong central government “to overawe them all,” then “men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company.” Life in such a state, Hobbes asserted in one of the most famous phrases in the literature of political theory, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
2 levels of estrangement in Hobbess philosophy.
Psychological level and Ontological level
Hobbes was a materialist , he saw every reality as wholly definable in terms of space, time, and the laws of causation. The universe is composed of objects in motion. Hobbes believes that each person is concerned with personal safety.
Hobbes says that peace is needed by everyone.
Among the great political thinkers only one, Thomas Hobbes, maintained that in their purely worldly qualities people are essentially equal. Hobbes view people are les deserving of equal respect than of equal disdain.
Hobbes opposed constitutionalism because of his pessimistic appraisal of human nature. Many passages in Hobbes writings show that he did not desire or even envision the possibility of anything like modern totalitarianism.
For Hobbes, any division of power was an invitation to chaos.
Locke
John Locke defended the establishment of constitutional government in England and who influenced the framers of the American Constitution, clearly did not believe people to be equal in their observable qualities. They were, for Locke, equal only in the rights received from God.
Believed that most people have the sense to see that others have certain rights, such as the right to life, simply because they are human beings. Most people are disposed to respect these rights. Human reasonableness for Locke meant both the capacity and the inclination to live by reason.
The idea that government should be wholly detached in matters of belief, and individual men and women left completely on their own, developed fairly recently, only two or three hundred years ago Locke defended such a doctrine near the end of the seventeenth century.
(equality) John Locke, the prinicpal theorist of modern liberalism, apparently assumed that government would generally be carried on by a hereditary aristocracy.
(power and possessers) A person is not obliged to obey unless he has voluntarily agreed to do so. At one point Locke seems to imply that not only does the founding of a government require consent but that every governmental act significantly affecting a persons life or rights requires consent, for he writes that “the Supream Power cannot take from any Man any part of his Property without his own consent.” The theory that political obligatrion is based on consent subordinates government to freedom. Even assuming that Locke did not mean to go so far as to require consent for every particular governmental act, his general pint is that nothing can be rightfully demanded of us that does not accord with each ones uncoerced and conscious will.
(limits) Lockes views were drawn from a solidly established medieval tradition, itself the outgrowth of an ancient Greek and Roman constitutionalist tradition.
(ends) Locke based his individualism, in economic and spiritual matters alike, on the same broad principles, and that the typical American liberal has rejected these principles in regard to the one area but clings to them in regard to the other. Locke assumed a certain essential estrangement among human beings. Locke also assumed that despite estrangement there is a natural harmony among individuals. If each one is left free to seek out and affirm ones own personal truth, universal truth will emerge spontaneously. Locke conceived of freedom primarily as the absence of governmental restraint.
He doesnt say that life without government would be terrible or impossible. He says that a government may save time and annoyance by doing for its citizens what they would have to do for themselves.
(estrangement) Karl Marx, the major intellectual source of socialism and communism, has shaken Western institutions more profoundly than any utterance since the Reformation. The key to Marxs attitude lay in the importance he attributed to economic conditions. Marx held that our ideas and feelings in truth our whole nature are shaped