Locke, Hobbes and Roussau on Government

John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau offer conceptions of how government developed and what government should and should not do. While each sees a relationship between human beings and their government in terms of human beings ceding certain powers to government in order to secure certain protections, Hobbes places more emphasis on civic responsibility, while Locke places more emphasis on the degree to which government is limited in its powers because all governmental powers derive from the governed. Through the action of reason, human beings become aware of the fact that self-preservation can best be secured if they unite and substitute organized cooperation for the anarchy of the state of nature. This is the making of the social covenant Hobbes sees as the means by which each person agrees to hand over to a sovereign the right of governing him or herself, provided that every other member of the prospective society does the same. Hobbes makes a number of assumptions regarding the way men behave in a state of nature and the meaning of their coming together in a society to protect themselves from one another. The natural state of war was something man wanted to escape from, says Hobbes, and what Hobbes wants to determine is how this escape was accomplished. Locke saw man as born into a state of perfect freedom, with no necessity to ask any other man before determining his own actions or disposing of his own property. Man in society does not have abso

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