h Hobbes wrote the Leviathan was the English Civil War (1632-1659), which culminated in the abdication and execution of Charles I. Even an absolute monarch may lose legitimacy in a state that is an artifact of human association: "The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them" (Hobbes 116). Marcuse also notes that Hobbes, who tutored Charles II, managed to survive the Civil War, Cromwell, and the Restoration, and that his theory considered the form of government "irrelevant . . . whether democracy, oligarchy, or limited monarchy, as long as it asserted sovereignty in its relations with other states and maintained its own authority in relation to its citizens" (Marcuse 172). Hobbes's discussion of the relationship between sovereign and citizens was to be taken up by Locke, whose political context was the Glorious Revolution (1688), and who developed it differently.
Locke's concept of state derives from a more or less natural theory of property. Because individuals by nature acquisitive, seeking out of the "common" property of mankind a beneficial share so that they may use their rational capacity to exploit its advantages, a mechanism for keeping unlimited desire for property in check -- the state -- is required. On the other hand, "he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind" (Locke 23). It is but a short step to the state's role in protecting the rational man's assertion of property rights and protecting what is shared in common from undue claims.
But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society; there, and there only is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the ha...