Natural Law in Hobbes and Locke

Paper Summary:

This essay compares and contrasts the conceptions of natural law held by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. The writer first explains that the traditional conception is that natural law is the inscrutable will of God, but this idea was challenged by renaissance humanism, which sought to discover natural law in human terms. The writer then explains that this was the basis of the scientific method, but it was challenged by the empirical skepticism of Hobbes and Locke. The skepticism of Hobbes translates into his pessimism regarding the natural state of man, which he describes as brutish and violent. In contrast, Locke posits that natural law is transcendent to the corrupt state of man, and this transcendent ideal prompts man to create society anew in terms of freedom and justice.

From the Paper:

"Hobbes called this philosophy "scarcely that of a sane man." A Deist claims belief in God, but pushes Him to the furthest reaches of physical reality where He is of no consequence. Hobbes pointed out the absurdity of such claims, but he was not arguing from a Christian point of view. Openly atheistic, he had no need for a God to sabotage the philosophical schemes built on empiricism. Neither was he enamored of the empirical optimism of Bacon, which he brushed aside in order to advance an unmitigated philosophy of empirical skepticism. He was the first to make a systematic exposition of this philosophy, which describes the sense perceptions as the only door to knowledge, but which also posits that such knowledge is not reliable, being subjective to the viewer and having no claims to any sort of objectivity."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edwin Curley (Ed.) Boston: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994.
• Locke, John. Political Writings. David Wootton (Ed.) Boston: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003.
• Robinson, Daniel Sommers. Anthology of Modern Philosophy. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1931.
• Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1928.

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