Question

John Locke viewed the Social Contract as a choice or "consent of the governed", where the people possess the power to change government. How did Thomas Hobbes see the Social Contract? Man is born in chains, but can be set free through good deeds. Man is born happy, but becomes more miserable as he ages. Man is born poor, but can rely on other individuals for security. Man is born selfish, but can give up some freedom in return for security provided by the government.

Answer 1

Man is born selfish, but can give up some freedom in return for security provided by the government.

Explanation/details:

Thomas Hobbes published a famous work called Leviathan in 1651. The title "Leviathan" comes from a biblical word for a great and mighty beast. Hobbes believed government is formed by people for the sake of their personal security and stability in society. In Hobbes' view, once the people put a king (or other leader in power), then that leader needs to have supreme power (like a great and mighty beast). Hobbes' view of the natural state of human beings without a government held that people are too divided and too volatile as individuals -- everyone looking out for his own interests. So for security and stability, authority and the power of the law needs to be in the hands of a powerful ruler like a king or queen. And so people willingly enter a "social contract" in which they live under a government that provides stability and security for society.

Probably the most famous set of lines from Hobbes' Leviathan book describes what he saw as the natural state of human affairs without government -- one in which every individual had freedom, but that meant it was a situation of "war of all against all," or we might say, every man for himself. Hobbes wrote:

• In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Answer 2

The correct answer is Man is born selfish, but can give up some freedom in return for security provided by the government.

Thomas Hobbes viewed the Social Contract as a way used by a group of people use to guarantied their own security by giving power to a government whose goal is to protect the citizens who gave them that power. If the government fail, the failure is accounted to the citizens who choose that government.

According to Hobbes' theory, all people are born with the right to do what they want, but when they are limited by the right of others to do what they want, they arrive at a conflict situation that usually results in violence.

It is for this reason that the social organization that establishes the limits of individual freedom and through the Contract arises, to establish the rules that allow to solve each situation and above all to hand over the mandate power to a government that is in charge of guaranteeing the proper functioning of this new social organization.