Thomas Hobbes Social Contract Analysis

Thomas Hobbes is now broadly viewed as one of a smaller group of truly extraordinary political thinkers, whose major work was the Leviathan rivals in meaning the political writings of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls. Hobbes is most known for his for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons. He is most famous for using his theory on the social contract to submit that human beings should submit to an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power (Lloyd, 2014) Hobbes wanted to ascertain the clear values for the construction of a civil organization that would not be subject to destruction from within. Hobbes maintains the ideology that people should look at their government as having absolute authority, while arguing that the government has absolute power he reserves the idea that we have the liberty of disobeying some of our government's instructions. He argues that subjects retain a

In his writings the Two Treatises of Government, Locke sheltered the idea that people are by nature free and equivalent against claims that God had made all people naturally submissive to a sovereign state. He argues the idea that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, which have a groundwork sovereign of the laws of any specific civilization. Locke used the idea that all men are indeed free by nature and equal as part of the reasoning for understanding valid political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature in theory transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property (Tuckness,