IndexIntroduction to Thomas HobbesIntroduction to John LockeDiscussion points of both philosophersState of nature by Thomas Hobbes and John LockeThe best kind of government according to Thomas Hobbes and John LockeFreedom of People according to Thomas Hobbes and John LockeConclusionsReferencesIntroduction to Thomas Hobbes“The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal 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, was born in 1588, April 5, in Westport, Wiltshire, England and died in 1679, December 4, in Derbyshire. Hobbes was by nature a deeply peaceful and cautious man. He has always hated violence. A disposition that began at age 4 when his father, a clergyman, fell out of favor and abandoned his wife and family after arguing with another vicar on the steps of his parish church in a village in Wiltshire. From his life story, there is no coincidence with his pessimistic thinking. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayIntroduction to John LockeBack in history, there are thinkers and scholars like Voltaire, thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American revolutionaries. These groups were influenced by the ideas brought by Locke. The man who is now being described is a very intellectual philosopher, John Locke. The man born in 1632 in England laid his ideas on the foundations of classical liberalism that would become increasingly widespread in Western countries. Furthermore, this "father of liberalism" was successfully drafted between 1677 and 1680, one of his most influential works, the Two Treatises of Government, advocated radical limits on the authority of the state limiting the function of government to the limited protection of rights of people to freedom. life, liberty and property. Talking Points of Both Philosophers State of Nature by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke On the point of the state of nature of two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, I identify that there are differences in their understanding according to this area of idea. According to Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is the condition of people before the state or civil society existed. 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 he sees man through his pessimistic vision, where men are brutal, selfish and solitary. Through this perspective, Hobbes sees that man is by nature a little greedy because they will have similar hopes and desires and will become enemies when they do not get them. This leads to the condition of man in a state of war, where man against man, force and fraud flourish and there is perpetual fear and struggle. They will always be at war as they are willing to gain, secure or defend something, while ultimately just trying to maintain their reputation. So, there are 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, no morality in the traditional sense of goodness and justice. Furthermore, there is no order to create a peaceful society. This is why if men want to gain something, they compete with violence to take possession of everyone, of men's persons, of wives, of children and of livestock, and make everyone fear them. Let's move on to the second psychological cause, namely distrust. With distrust, they sometimes try to defend themselves for safety throughthe provocation. Distrust does not always mean provoking others, but only an effort to secure one's territory and acquire some interests. Last in the list of causes of quarrel is glory, where it is mainly about power. It leads to the purpose of invading which is for reputation. Within the glory, what is explained is how a man wants to gain power and gain more and more power. While, according to John Locke, the state of nature is the condition of people before any government existed. It argues in the state of nature, people are born with natural freedom and have rights through the phrase “Life, Liberty and Property”. Based on an optimistic perspective, Locke asserts that men are positively recognized as God's creatures and coexistence without a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them. Interestingly, Locke believes that God created the earth and gave it in common to all humans. For Locke, human beings have rights. He successfully influenced his ideas in the American colonies in the founding of the United States. His idea of relevance is about government imagining what life might be like if people lived in a state of nature without laws and governments. Therefore, he argued that in a state of nature, society is free, equal and rational. He understands that men are capable individuals, capable of thinking rationally and willing to coexist peacefully. Every alienable property of every person has the right to “Life, Liberty, Property”. Ownership is also the meaning of ownership. He also said that every person also has the right to punish those who do not follow the laws and who do not respect the rights of others. Furthermore, Locke states that property is really important, which comes before the sovereign and the social contract. Locke means that property is natural and has its origin in the state of nature. Property exists before the state, so the state is created to protect property. This is a fundamentally significant statement, and it is part of Locke's liberal view of government. Furthermore, Locke states that the purpose of the state is to protect people's rights to life, liberty, and property. For Locke, human beings have rights. They have rights to what they do and what they accomplished with their work before the state even existed. The State, in fact, is created in a social contract to protect the rights over oneself, one's work and the fruits of one's labor. For example, Adira and Lukman have arrived in a new world. They find an unclaimed area of land. They begin a process of transforming the land to build a farm. According to John Locke, this work is how Adira and Lukman acquire rights to the land. Property rights over the product produced on the farm are another important addition. It's because Adira and Lukman have the right to decide how to best use their results. They can consume it or exchange it with other people for other goods and services they may need. These insights into 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. The Best Kind of Government According to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke I also identify that there are differences between two intelligent thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on their thoughts on the idea of the best kind of government. Thomas Hobbes believes in the absolute monarchy type of government because he states that man desires power and glory and explicitly states that there needs to be a sole power to rule over the citizen in case of regulation. This is because it can induce a man not to break the contract or alliance between the subjects and the ruler or the subjects among thesubjects through the social contract. He quoted that: "And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and have no strength to protect a man." (Leviathan, Book II, Chapter 17), which connects to a meaning that Hobbes clearly states that Leviathan is a power that should and can be imposed on all people with a little force, otherwise the contract will bring in vain as those who abandon the contract will have indivisible advantages. In Hobbes' vision of the state of nature, individual human beings in the pursuit of their own self-preservation and self-interest will inevitably come into conflict, into war, of all against all. The creation of a ruler, Leviathan, who will establish the law is one of the ways out of this situation. A law that must be respected and justice is obedience to this law. People should form a social contract so that a monarch can protect them and keep them safe using the monarchical system of government. Through the monarchy system, the monarch will supervise the sovereign to not commit any excesses of governing society, such as breaking the law. Law begins only when a sovereign exists, since law is the command of the sovereign. In the context of the social contract, there are two conditions in which sovereign with subjects and subjects with subjects. Through the condition of sovereign and subjects, probability, there can be three situations: the first is between the monarch and the rulers and the second between the rulers and citizens and the third between the monarch and citizens. In the first situation, the implementation of an effective way to prevent rulers from being overwhelmed has continued to this day, called limitation of power. Through the limitation of power, monarch and rulers will have their own role, scope of work and authority, presumably the rulers should know that they cannot be the monarch. Returning to the story of Hobbes' life, one of the main reasons why the ruler must not divine his absolute power is because he does not want a war like the brutal war, the English Civil War (1642-1651), to happen again. While, in the second situation, which is the one between ruler and citizens, Hobbes believes that citizens should obey any type of law as long as it does not affect their lives and does not lead to the death sentence. The ruler is not subject to the law because it is the ruler who creates the law and applies the law for and to the citizens. Moving on to the third situation, that between the monarch and the citizens. The interesting part here is that the monarch is the only entity governing the citizens and not subject to the law as he will create the law. Through the condition between subjects and subjects, it means within the citizens themselves such as Citizen A, Citizen B and Citizen C. Thomas Hobbes once again states that he is willing to avoid any war between the citizens themselves since he experienced such a brutal war , the English Civil War (1642-1651). Locke, on the other hand, is against it and believes that government or even no particulars are nothing 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 enforce and protect the natural rights of the people. If a ruler violated natural 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 rebel and establish a new government. Ultimately, returning to the state of nature, he concluded that humans are naturally rational in understanding how to manage society. Freedom of people according to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke In the area of the idea about freedom of people, it is clearly possible to differentiate the line of thought between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Basically, there are two concepts offreedom, 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 the interference of other people, mainly concerned with freedom from external restrictions. The concept of positive freedom and negative freedom comes from Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 essay, which contributes to reawakening interest in political theory in the Anglo-Saxon world. Proudly, the essay remains one of the most influential and widely discussed texts in that field. Above all, it explores the philosophical nature of freedom and the distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom. These two concepts connect back to those great philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, in their thoughts on the freedom of people. According to Thomas Hobbes, it means freedom or freedom as “absence of opposition” or “external impediments” to movement. Due to impediments, a man's power can be taken away as he cannot do what he would like, however it is not an obstacle for him to use his power as his judgment and reason dictate to him as what Hobbes says in Leviathan, the right of nature is the freedom that every man has to use his own power and to preserve himself, that is, his own life. Therefore, any consequence of any action he can take, only through his judgment and reason. Hobbes explicitly differentiates freedom from power. An entity will be said to lack freedom when the impediments to movement are external, an entity will be said to lack power or capacity when the impediments are internal. It is also stated that there is a danger in the freedom of subjects to challenge the sovereign. For example, a book on the table cannot move by itself, it does not mean that it lacks the freedom to move, but it lacks the power or ability to move. These thoughts cited Hobbes as a philosopher on the formulation of negative freedom, and this is demonstrated by the way he views freedom and power. Unlike John Locke, he rejected Sir Robert Filmer's definition of freedom, not mentioning Thomas Hobbes who has the same definition of freedom as Locke himself who describes freedom as a "two-way" power, combining two conditional powers which we have called agents, that is, someone who is endowed 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 in being free from any higher power in the whole environment of life. Fundamentally, people are not subject to the will or legislative authority of others, but have only the law of nature as their government. It states that the freedom of nature must be subject to no other constraint than the law of nature. In a simple explanation, this can best be described as if individuals were willing to do something then they would have the power to do it and if they refrain from doing that thing then they would have the power to endure it. Although there is Despite the obvious differences, there is similarity with both arguments in terms of self-preservation in which they believe that people should have their own rights to take the action they may want to do so. In other ways of perception, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke may be different in some circumstances. It is because of the pessimistic element that pushed Thomas Hobbes to believe that people or men are selfish creatures while, John Locke, who is an optimistic person, human beings perceive their actions optimistically. This means that they know how to describe the decision of good and evil and simply according to their desires. Please note: this is just an example. Get a personalized document from us now, 17(3),
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