in 1762. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each embraced the notion of natural law as a philosophical axiom and as a precondition to the idea of the social contract. The concept of natural law holds that humans exist in nature as equal, autonomous units, each endowed by the Creator with the same rights. (This concept was later to be articulated as the basis of American independence: "all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . .") Out of this idea of natural law developed the corollary theory of a social contract, which in turn had two distinct components: the contract of society, not the contract of government, that was of explicit concern to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and important differences developed out of their discussions of this principle.
Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was the first attempt to provide a "systematic, utilitarian rationalization of natural law" (Hobbes xi). In this work, Hobbes laid the foundation for what he called "the science of natural justice," which held natural law to be the moral basis and norm for statute law. Hobbes argued that in the rational construction of law, any violation of the principles of natural justice would result in some form of divine punishment. Yet Hobbes did not extol a state of nature, where he found humans in deadly competition and life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes 107). Man is saved from the bleak consequences of competition in a natural state by the countervailing force of reason.
Hobbes defined the right of nature as "the liberty each man has to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature" (Hobbes 109). A law of nature, by contrast, exerts a restraining i
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