Hobbes and Enlightenment Ideas

Thomas Hobbes contribution was the suggestion that the social order was made by human beings and therefore could be changed by human beings. Hobbes looked on the individual as selfish, concerned with self-preservation, searching for power, and (potentially at least) at war with others. For Hobbes, in the state of nature, there was a war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish, and short. Since individuals are rational, they agree to surrender their individual rights to the sovereign in order to create a state whereby they can be protected from other individuals. Locke and Rousseau further developed this idea of a social contract, although in a somewhat different form than Hobbes.

Contributions of Hobbes include the recognition of the existence of the individual and individual rights along with the concepts of rationality, self-interest, competitiveness, and calculation as individual attributes. Adams and Sydie also point out (p. 14) that Hobbes did not consider the ruler or monarch to be ordained by God (as monarchs often claimed in the divine right of kings) or some external force, but by the people themselves since "authority is given by the subjects themselves." This is important in the development of ideas of political democracy in western Europe and North America.

Enlightenment writings demonstrate a shift away from the view that society and estates (ranks of nobility and the common people) are the basic unit of social analysis and toward the view that the individual is the basis. In this approach, individuals have inherent qualities, abilities, and rights and society emerged and developed as the result of a social contract among these individuals. Those writers who supported an earlier social order would have viewed Locke's notion that the state is the result of "individuals consenting to be governed" to be unacceptable – supporters of an earlier order viewed society as the basic unit, with people having to fill their place in this structure.

In contrast to systems of thought where the sacred had dominated and where questioning was discouraged, Enlightenment thinkers viewed human reason as dominant. No subjects of study were to be forbidden, there were no unaskable questions, with all aspects of human life appropriate for examination and study. In doing this, Enlightenment thinkers combined the philosophic tradition of abstract rational thought (Descartes and other philosophers) with the tradition of experimentation or empirical philosophy (from Galileo, Newton, Bacon and others). The result was a new system of human inquiry that attacked the old order and privileges, put emphasis and faith on science, the scientific method and education, and

acquired the practical function of asking critical questions about existing institutions and demanding that the unreasonable ones, those contrary to human nature, be changed. All social obstacles to human perfectibility were to be progressively eliminated. (Zeitlin, p.2).

The new approach was an empirical and scientific one at the same time that it was philosophical. The world was an object of study, and the Enlightenment thinkers thought that people could understand and control the world by means of reason and empirical research. Social laws could be discovered, and society could be improved by means of rational and empirical inquiry. This form of thought was reformist, and one that challenged the old order. Enlightenment thinkers were generally optimistic in outlook, looking on their system of thought as a way of improving the social world.