Difference Between Enlightenment And Thomas Hobbes

The Enlightenment era was a huge change on how people viewed government. There was always a king in place and this king made sure that the people under him did what they were supposed to do. The people did not go against anything their king said or did because the king was placed there by God. This was the belief of divine right which meant God bestowed the crown upon the king’s head and no one would dare act against the decisions of God. The king was considered an absolute monarch. This meant the king had absolute power over all that he ruled. This type of government did not last long. Once the 1700’s rolled around a group of enlightened thinkers emerged. The philosophers began to question the concepts of their government and how the king

Where Hobbes believed that the function of the state was to govern over the people. It was necessary to keep hostile tendencies in check. Hobbes believed people were either evil of selfish and that people make bad decisions. Therefore, he thought that people needed absolute monarchs ruling over them. Locke did not believe these ideas to be true. Locke believed that the essential role of the state is not to govern the people but to manage and administer its material wealth, or “property”. He believed people are born into this world with natural rights. The three basic natural rights of the people are Life, Liberty, and Property. Since he believed people were born with these rights they would know when these rights were violated. He began to think that the role of the government is to protect these basic natural rights. He developed ideas of empiricism, liberalism, and classical republicanism which justified mankind’s move toward self-rule. These ideas may sound very familiar because most of his ideas were adopted into the declaration of independence. John Locke’s ideas became the foundation of many political systems and gave millions of people