Hobbes and Locke

Questions for Study and Discussion:

1) Consider Hobbes' and Locke's conceptions of human nature.  What are the key areas of divergence?  Are there important areas of convergence?  Where in the writings we have read do you see antecedents for the views of these two thinkers?

2) What, for Hobbes and Locke, is the state of nature?  How do human beings interact outside of social and governmental control?  Can there be any rational order without political order?  How and why do human beings make the transition from a state of nature to society?

3) How do Hobbes and Locke employ the concept of natural law?  Does natural law involve a description of the world as it is or a prescription for how it should operate?

4) What is civil society and what is its relationship to the state?  Can society exist without government?  Government without society?  What is sovereignty?

5)  Defining justice was a central concern in the political writings of Plato and Aristotle.  How do Hobbes' and Locke's definitions of justice differ from classical interpretations of the problem?  Is justice an issue for seventeenth-century political thinkers in the same way as it was for the ancient Greeks?  Do Hobbes and Locke tackle this issue directly or is it merely implicit in their construction of the rights and obligations which temper a polity?

6) Consider the idea of the social contract as defined by Hobbes and Locke.  What, to these writers, are the rights and liberties of the people?  Their obligations?  The power and obligations of the state?  Are rights and duties constructed by a particular society, granted by a particular sovereign, or determined by nature?  Are any rights essential and inalienable?

7) How do Hobbes and Locke define property?  Does property exist in a state of nature?  What is the role of society in determining property rights?  Is property necessarily material?  Or does it have a broader definition concerning the rights of individuals to live free from state interference?