Locke vs. Hobbes, Nature, and Civil Society (Part 3)
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They may, as in Locke, recognize rationally that committing an act of force to rule another essentially subjects them to a forfeiture of their own rights. Many present and past societies such as those in the United States have shown that the combination of minimal government and egoistic individuals, forming what would be according to Hobbes a state of nature, have coexisted peacefully and produced much “commodious living. ” Therefore, the greatest good for the egoist individual does not invariably reside in consent to absolute governance, as Hobbes would insist.
Locke
On the other hand, Locke expresses a different notion of human nature and, concordantly, of the state of nature. He holds that “Men living according to reason, without a common superior on earth, to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. ”[9] Because Locke’s theory is rooted in natural law, his arguments closely follow the notion of the objective rights of individuals- broadly, their freedom, equality, and independence. His portrayal of the state of nature better resembles one of anarchic individualism, an image far from the brutality and paranoia of the Hobbesian state. Locke claims, indirectly, that Hobbes fails to distinguish appropriately between the state of nature and the state of war. He also does not simply posit man in nature as a thought experiment, as does Hobbes, but he suggests that historically many have lived in such a state.
Locke asserts the transcendent reality of natural law, with reason as the tool for discovering it. In short, by initiating force, aggressors against persons or property have renounced reason (and their humanity) and are subject to force themselves. [10] Underlying Locke’s nature-war distinction, only the initiation of force constitutes a state of war, and thus a state of nature can exist in peace. While Hobbes described man in nature as primarily amoral, Locke holds the opposite as true. Besides the existentialist-like quality of morality under natural law- by which one who wills some immoral wrong has inevitably willed it universally and for himself- rationality also guides action by demonstrating the counter-productivity and destructiveness of aggression against one’s fellow man. In this way, Locke addresses the problems in Hobbes’s analysis of the violent and chaotic implications of egoism, instead arguing for the spontaneous orders caused by rational self-interested thought.
Locke’s Civil Society
The reasons Locke provides for why man might want to leave the ideal state of nature’s “perfect freedom and equality” are the “inconveniences” experienced by the majority of rational people: the costs of lack of knowledge of certain laws and an impartial adjudicator; the absence of an ultimate power for law enforcement, which allows for the strongest groups to execute what they please; and the agent’s general difficulty in judging law impartially.
For Locke, the purpose of civil society is not for the governed to be directly guided in such a way that they will survive and flourish, as Hobbes might advocate. Though survival and propagation are the preferred outcomes, the function of government is specifically to provide a framework for the protection of life, liberty, and property. Locke’s view can be summarized as one of a minimal state, whose justification requires total consent of the governed. [11] His objections to unlimited sovereignty of the kind Hobbes supports are part of an implicit undercurrent of his works, but are well-delineated in his Second Treatise in Chapter IV, “Of Slavery”:
“But freedom of men under government, is, to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where the rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another man: as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.
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