Ideas of Locke, Rousseau & Hobbes

In the years that preceded the 1789 French Revolution, the period of the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries was known in historical and philosophical terms as the Age of Enlightenment. While it is certainly true that this definition is not allencompassing or conclusive, the very name "Enlightenment" embodies the spirit of the time. In this, at least the way the age was conceived by both those living in it, and later historical evaluations of the era, one of the most predominant new ideas had to do with the very nature of humans, the way government should operate, and the way that government should relate to human nature.

In a sense, then, Europeans were sensing that they were living in a new age an age in which the past was termed a time of barbarism and intellectual and philosophical darkness. There was a new sense of progress, and an idea that all things were discoverable through the intellect using the tools of science and philosophy. Similarly, the Enlightenment changed the ideas about natural law and natural rights. With this came a greater spirit of individualism, and the idea that all things were possible for humans.

This paper will concentrate on social contract theory, and on the Enlightenment in the guise of three of its foremost writers and philosophers: John Locke, JeanJacques Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes. The paper will concentrate on Locke's ideas on natural rights, Rousseau's social contract, and Hobbes' work on government and the human res

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rstanding (commonwealth) and appeal to the social aspect of humanity by placing the burden of social governing on the members of society: Man being born. . . with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or a number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others. . . (p. 50). JeanJacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland in 1712. He grew up under the strictness of Calvinism, and had several failed careers before he moved to France and began to write on political theory. Like Locke, Rousseau believed that all political theory beings with the national that man is born into a state of nature or perfect freedom. It is, however, that state that propels men into the mutual agreement of society, and must therefore allow the establishment of laws that comprise a way to organize and develop that society. More importantly, though, Rousseau's 1762 publication of the Social Contract established a basis by which the state of nature could be expanded and turned

Category: Philosophy - I