Lord of the Flies
Hobbes vs Locke
Hobbes: Government is formed to protect the people.
Humans are basically selfish creatures who will do anything to better their position. Left to
themselves, people will act on their evil impulses. People therefore should not be trusted to make
decisions on their own. Governments were created, to protect people from their own selfishness
and evil. The best government was one that had the great power of a leviathan, or sea monster.
Hobbes believed in the rule of a king because he felt a country needed an authority figure to
provide direction and leadership. Because the people were only interested in promoting their own
self-interests, Hobbes believed democracy - allowing citizens to vote for government leaders would never work. Hobbes wrote, "All mankind [is in] a perpetual and restless desire for
power... that [stops] only in death." Consequently, giving power to the individual would create a
dangerous situation that would start a "war of every man against every man" and make life
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Locke: Government is established to protect the rights of the people.
Humans beings decide to form a society out of the state of nature because there must be unity
among men in order to protect one another, and so that they may punish offenders of the justice.
Men do this under the rule of an individual who is selected by the people, and to whom the
people give up some of their personal rights. Though humans give up certain rights to the chosen
authority, they are entitled to certain rights reserved to them alone, which they hold within the
society. All members of the society should be equal under the law of justice, and that no man is
better than another, since all men are created equal, and all are equal before the laws of nature.
The ruler or authority over a society should be an individual chosen by the people, to represent
the peoples' ideas, and to use its power to help the citizens of that society. The people consent
and agree to respect and obey the authority which they have chosen. The people must, out of
common decency, obey the government's law, when it is in harmony with that of the natural law,
which is present in the state of nature.
The government must not oppress the people whom it governs, and must not abuse its power, lest
the society fall in anarchy.