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Essay / Comparison of the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in different areas
Table of contentsIntroduction to Thomas HobbesIntroduction to John LockeTalking points of the two philosophersState of nature by Thomas Hobbes and John LockeBest type of government according to Thomas Hobbes and John LockeFreedom of Les people according to Thomas Hobbes and John LockeConclusionReferencesIntroduction to Thomas Hobbes“The life of man is solitary, poor, wicked, brutish, and short,” a quote from the book Leviathan, Book I, Chapter 13, written by an English philosopher and scientist. , and historian, known as Thomas Hobbes, born April 5, 1588 in Westport, Wiltshire, England and died December 4, 1679 in Derbyshire. Hobbes was by nature a deeply peaceful and prudent man. He always hated violence. An arrangement which had begun at the age of 4 when his own father, a clergyman, was disgraced and abandoned his wife and family after fighting with another vicar on the steps of his parish church in a Wiltshire village . According to his life story, there is no coincidence in his pessimistic thinking. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayIntroduction to John LockeBack in history, there are thinkers and scholars such as Voltaire, the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers , Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American revolutionaries. These groups were influenced by the ideas brought by Locke. The man who is now described is a very intellectual philosopher, John Locke. The man born in 1632 in England laid his ideas on the foundations of classical liberalism which would become increasingly widespread in Western countries. Furthermore, this "Father of Liberalism" was successfully written between 1677 and 1680. One of his most influential works, the Two Treatises of Government, argued for radical limits on state authority, limiting the function of government to the narrow protection of the rights of the people to liberty of life and inheritance.Talking Points of the Two PhilosophersState of Nature by Thomas Hobbes and John LockeOn the question of the state of nature by two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, I identify that there are differences in their understanding depending on this realm of ideas. According to Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is the condition of men before the existence of a State or a civil society. During this time, all humans are born equal and equally share the right to do what is necessary for their survival. The climax of The State of Nature concerns the nature of man, when Hobbes agrees that man is equal in mind and body, while seeing man through his pessimistic view, where man is brutal, selfish and lonely. From this perspective, Hobbes sees that man, by nature, is somehow greedy because he has similar hopes and desires, and that he becomes an enemy if he does not understand them. This leads to the condition of man in a state of war, in which man against every man, force and fraud thrive and there is perpetual fear and conflict. They will be in war all the time because they are ready to win, secure, or defend something, while they are only trying to maintain their reputation in the end. There are therefore three psychological causes of quarrel which are competition, distrust and glory. In the context of competition, it must be understood that there is no obligation for people to respect others, nor any morality in the traditional sense of goodness and justice. Furthermore, there is no order aimed at creating a peaceful society. This is why, if man wants to gain something, he competes using violence to make himself master of everyone, like themen, women, children and cattle, and make everyone fear them. Let's move on to the second psychological cause, which is distrust. In distrust, they sometimes try to defend themselves for their safety by resorting to provocation. Distrust does not always mean provoking others, but simply an effort to secure one's own territory and gain interests. Last in the list of causes of strife is glory, which mainly concerns power. This leads to the goal of the invasion which is reputation. Inside glory, what is explained is how a man wants to gain power as well as more and more power. Whereas, according to John Locke, the state of nature is the condition of people before there is a government. He states that in the state of nature, people are born with natural freedom and have rights through a phrase ““Life, Liberty and Property”. Drawing on an optimistic perspective, Locke asserts that man is a positive recognition as a creature of God and living together without a common superior on earth having the authority to judge between them. Interestingly, Locke believes that God created the earth and gave it in common to all human beings. For Locke, humans have rights. He managed to influence his ideas in the American colonies during the founding of the United States. His relevant idea concerns government by imagining what life might be like if people lived in a state of nature without laws or governments. Thus, he argued that in a state of nature, society is free, equal and rational. It views man as a capable individual, able to think rationally and willing to coexist peacefully. Each of each person has alienable property with the right to “Life, Liberty, Property”. Property is also at the head of the meaning of succession. He also said that everyone also has the right to punish those who do not respect the laws and who do not respect the rights of others. Furthermore, Locke asserts that property is very important, above sovereignty and the social contract. Locke means that property is natural and originates in the state of nature. Property exists before the state, which is why the state is created to protect property. This is a fundamentally significant statement, and it is part of Locke's liberal vision of government. Furthermore, Locke says that the purpose of the state is to protect the rights of people in terms of life, liberty, and property. For Locke, humans have rights. They have rights to the things they make and the things they made through their labor before the state even existed. The State, in fact, is created in a social contract, in order to protect the rights to oneself, to one's labor and to the fruits of one's labor. For example, Adira and Lukman arrived in a new world. They find an area of unclaimed land. They begin a process of transforming the land to build a farm. According to John Locke, this work allows Adira and Lukman to acquire rights to the land. Another important addition is ownership rights to the product produced on the farm. This is because Adira and Lukman have the right to decide the best way to use their products. They can consume it or exchange it with other people for other goods and services they may need. These ideas about the importance of property rights in ensuring a free and prosperous society are as applicable today as they were when John Locke originally wrote them. Best Type of Government According to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke I also identify that there are differences between two intelligent thinkers. , ThomasHobbes and John Locke on their thoughts on the idea of the best type of government. Thomas Hobbes believes in the absolute monarchy type of government because he said that man desires power and glory and explicitly states that it is necessary to have a single power to rule over the citizen in case of regulation. This is because it can motivate a man not to break the contract or alliance between subjects and the sovereign or subjects to subjects through the social contract. Quoted: “And covenants, without the sword, are but words, and have no power to secure a man. » (Leviathan, Book II, Chapter 17), which is consistent with the sense that Hobbes clearly says that Leviathan is a power that should and can be imposed on everyone by a little force, otherwise the contract will lead in vain as people who abandon the contract will have indivisible advantages. According to Hobbes's view of the state of nature, human individuals, seeking their own self-preservation and self-interest, will inevitably enter into conflict, a war, of all against all. The creation of a sovereign, the Leviathan, who will establish law is one of the ways out of this situation. A law to be obeyed and justice is obedience to that law. People should enter into a social contract so that a monarch can protect them and keep them safe using the monarchical system of government. Through the monarchical system, the monarch will supervise the inclusion of the ruler so as not to commit excesses in the management of society, such as violating the law. The law only begins when there is a sovereign, because the law is the command of the sovereign. In the context of the social contract, there are two conditions where sovereign with subjects and subjects with subjects. Thanks to the condition of sovereign and subjects, probability, there can be three situations of which the first is between the monarch and the rulers and the second between the rulers and the citizens and the third between the monarch and the citizens. In the first situation, the implementation of an effective way to prevent the rulers from going unchecked continues to this day, which calls for a limitation of power. Through the limitation of power, the monarch and rulers will have their own role, scope of work and authority, with the rulers supposedly having to know that they cannot be the monarch. Coming back to the story of Hobbes' life, one of the main reasons why the sovereign does not have to second-guess his absolute power is that he does not want a war as brutal as the English Civil War (1642 - 1651) reproduces. While in the second situation, which is between the ruler and the citizens, Hobbes believes that citizens should obey any kind of law as long as it does not affect their lives and sentence them to death. The ruler is not subject to the law because it is the ruler who creates the law and enforces it for and to the citizens. Let's move on to the third situation, that between the monarch and the citizens. The interesting part here is that the monarch is the only entity to govern the citizens and not subject to the law since he creates the law. Through the condition between subjects and subjects, this means within the citizens themselves such as Citizen A, Citizen B and Citizen C. Thomas Hobbes once again declares his desire to avoid any war within the citizens themselves since he experienced such a brutal war, the English Civil War (1642-1651). While Locke is in contrast and believes that government or even no much more than absolute power at the top of the hierarchy. He adds that the king should not hold absolute power as Hobbes had said, but act only to uphold and protect the natural rights of the people. If a sovereign violated thenatural rights, the social contract was broken. Thus, the natural rights of individuals limited the power of the king and the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government. In conclusion, returning to the state of nature, he concluded that man is naturally rational in understanding how to manage society. Liberty of Persons According to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke In the area of the idea of liberty of persons, it is clearly possible to differentiate the lines of thought between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Basically, there are two concepts of freedom, which are positive freedom and negative freedom. The meaning of positive freedom is the possession of the ability to act according to one's free will, while negative freedom means freedom from interference from others, primarily concerned with freedom from external constraint. The concept of positive liberty and negative liberty comes from Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 essay, which contributed to a revival of interest in political theory in the English-speaking world. Proudly, the essay remains one of the most influential and widely discussed texts in the field. Above all, it explores the philosophical nature of freedom, the distinction between positive and negative freedom. These two concepts reconnect with the great philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in their reflections on the freedom of people. According to Thomas Hobbes, it means liberty or liberty as the "absence of opposition" or "external obstacles" to movement. Through obstacles a man's power can be taken away because he cannot do what he wants, but that does not stop him from using his own power as his judgment and reason will dictate to him as what says Hobbes in Leviathan, the right of nature is the freedom that each man has to use his own power and to preserve himself, that is, oh, his own life. Therefore, the consequences of any action he may take depend only on his judgment and reason. Hobbes explicitly differentiates freedom from power. An entity will be said to lack freedom when the obstacles to movement are external, an entity will be said to lack power or capacity when the obstacles are internal. It is also asserted that there is a danger in the freedom of subjects to defy the sovereign. For example, a book on the table cannot move on its own does not mean that it does not have the freedom to move, but it lacks the power or ability to move. These thoughts cite Hobbes as a philosopher on the formulation of negative liberty, and this is proven by how he views freedom and power. Unlike John Locke, he rejected this definition of freedom provided by Sir Robert Filmer, not mentioning Thomas Hobbes who has the same definition. definition of freedom, which had the same thing. Locke describes freedom as a “two-way” power, which combines two conditional powers that we call agents, that is, someone with a will. This statement shows that his thinking is very different from that of Hobbes who distinguishes freedom and power. According to Locke, in the state of nature, freedom consists of being free from all higher powers throughout the environment of life. Basically, people are not subject to the will or legislative authority of others, but are governed only by the law of nature. He asserts that the freedom of nature must be subject to no constraints other than the law of nature. In a simple way it can be best described as if individuals were willing to do something then they would have the power to do it and if they refrained from doing that thing then they would have the power to abstain. There are obvious differences, there is a similarity between the two arguments in terms of self-preservation where they believe that, 17(3),