Thomas Hobbes believed in the need for an absolute monarchy. This is because he thought that there needed to be a strong ruler to keep citizens under control. Because of his strong views on human nature, Hobbes wanted a government in which the leader could impose order and demand obedience.

Hobbes believed that a social contract was necessary to protect people from their own worst instincts. On the other hand, Locke believed that a social contract was necessary to protect people’s natural rights. Locke believed that if government did not protect people’s rights, they could reject it.

Hobbes was a proponent of Absolutism, a system which placed control of the state in the hands of a single individual, a monarch free from all forms of limitations or accountability. Locke, on the other hand, favored a more open approach to state-building.

He believed oligarchy was the type of government best suited to maintain order. Explanation: Hobbes believed that a government headed by a king was the best form that the sovereign could take. Placing all power in the hands of a king would mean more resolute and consistent exercise of political authority.

Because of Hobbes’ pessimistic view of human nature, he believed the only form of government strong enough to hold humanity’s cruel impulses in check was absolute monarchy, where a king wielded supreme and unchecked power over his subjects.

In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes argued that the absolute power of the sovereign was ultimately justified by the consent of the governed, who agreed, in a hypothetical social contract, to obey the sovereign in all matters in exchange for a guarantee of peace and security.

In Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan is a serpent and a symbol of Israel’s enemies, who will be slain by God. In Job 41, it is a sea monster and a symbol of God’s power of creation.

The Laws of Nature and the Social Contract. Hobbes thinks the state of nature is something we ought to avoid, at any cost except our own self-preservation (this being our “right of nature,” as we saw above). This takes Hobbes to be saying that we ought, morally speaking, to avoid the state of nature.

Hobbes asserted that the people agreed among themselves to “lay down” their natural rights of equality and freedom and give absolute power to a sovereign. Hobbes believed that a government headed by a king was the best form that the sovereign could take.

His enduring contribution was as a political philosopher who justified wide-ranging government powers on the basis of the self-interested consent of citizens. In Hobbes’s social contract, the many trade liberty for safety.

To Locke, a Government existed, among other things, to promote public good, and to protect the life, liberty, and property of its people. For this reason, those who govern must be elected by the society, and the society must hold the power to instate a new Government when necessary.

Thesis: John Locke and Thomas Hobbes each advocated divergent tenets of human nature and government during the seventeenth century; John Locke promoted an optimistic view of human nature in which they lived under a government that protected the rights of the people; Thomas Hobbes published his perspective of the human …

Thomas Hobbes believed that humans were brutish by nature and needed to be controlled by an absolute monarch. John Locke believed that people were reasonable and moral. Locke also believed that people have certain natural rights. (Life, liberty, and property).

The classic social-contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)—held that the social contract is the means by which civilized society, including government, arises from a historically or logically preexisting condition of …

According to Locke, the main purpose of government is to protect those natural rights that the individual cannot effectively protect in a state of nature.