Hobbes Vs John Locke Essay

Life on Earth is simple enough. Living beings are born; living beings die; everything else is just filler. Humans are different. The human spirit drives our species to do more than just survive. We must have purpose. We must have a story. This drive is repeatedly evident throughout our history, perhaps most evident in the evolution of the country we would one day call the United States of America. Though civilizations existed for thousands of years prior, it was not until the migration and colonization of the land by Europeans that it would truly start to evolve into the representation of human spirit that it is today. Understanding the environment of change, the desire for the future, and reasoning behind the immigrants decisions – these factors
Thomas Hobbes observed the events of the Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution and spoke on the nature of man. He believed that man, as a rule, was self-involved and apt to be cruel, so a strong central government was necessary to reign in man’s true natures of desire, greed, and vengeance. In that vein, he felt that it was the obligation of the people to surrender certain rights to the will of a sovereign to ensure the well-being of society. His contemporary, John Locke, while agreeing that people had an obligation to be governed, countered that the state of man was generally good. Man was endowed with natural rights and that no sovereign should have the ability to take them away, and government should exist to protect such rights. Should the government fail to protect the people, they would be released from that
From the first settlers who had nothing to start with but a handful of supplies and what nature offered; to the middle class professionals who redefined the meaning of self-worth; to the men who questioned our development and decided to establish a new nation; for these people life was more than just an act of survival, it was a story of the desire to be more. Driven by capitalism and Christianity, colonists left Europe for the unknown, hoping to make their own place in the world. They risked everything – their homes, their lives – to do more than just survive. Inspired by men like Hobbes and Locke, they redefined what civilized society was, and when the path of evolution became blocked they rebelled, and started a new chapter in their evolution – the American