![]() This event reduced the power of the king and made Parliament the major authority in English government. He sided with the Protestant Parliament against the Roman Catholic King James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1685. Locke studied science and medicine at Oxford University and became a professor there. ![]() John Locke (1632–1704) was born shortly before the English Civil War. These thinkers had a profound effect on the American and French revolutions and the democratic governments that they produced. These thinkers valued reason, science, religious tolerance, and what they called “natural rights”-life, liberty, and property.Įnlightenment philosophers John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all developed theories of government in which some or even all the people would govern. A new age with fresh ideas was emerging-the European Enlightenment.Įnlightenment thinkers wanted to improve human conditions on earth rather than concern themselves with religion and the afterlife. In any conflict between divine and royal law, Hobbes wrote, the individual should obey the king or choose death.īut the days of absolute kings were numbered. Thus, he advised that the church become a department of the king’s government, which would closely control all religious affairs. He feared religion could become a source of civil war. Hobbes warned against the church meddling with the king’s government. Once the people had given absolute power to the king, they had no right to revolt against him. Hobbes also maintained that the social contract was an agreement only among the people and not between them and their king. Placing all power in the hands of a king would mean more resolute and consistent exercise of political authority, Hobbes argued. Hobbes believed that a government headed by a king was the best form that the sovereign could take. Hobbes called this agreement the “social contract.” The sovereign would make and enforce the laws to secure a peaceful society, making life, liberty, and property possible. The sovereign, created by the people, might be a person or a group. Hobbes asserted that the people agreed among themselves to “lay down” their natural rights of equality and freedom and give absolute power to a sovereign. Hobbes borrowed a concept from English contract law: an implied agreement. The only way out of this situation, Hobbes said, was for individuals to create some supreme power to impose peace on everyone. In the state of nature, there were no laws or anyone to enforce them. As a result, everyone suffered from “continued fear and danger of violent death and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Every person was free to do what he or she needed to do to survive. Hobbes began Leviathan by describing the “state of nature” where all individuals were naturally equal. Hobbes likened the leviathan to government, a powerful state created to impose order. The title of the book referred to a leviathan, a mythological, whale-like sea monster that devoured whole ships. Shortly after Charles was executed, an English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), wrote Leviathan, a defense of the absolute power of kings. The war ended with the beheading of the king. In 1649, a civil war broke out over who would rule England-Parliament or King Charles I. As the absolute rule of kings weakened, Enlightenment philosophers argued for different forms of democracy. ![]() Starting in the 1600s, European philosophers began debating the question of who should govern a nation. Bill of Rights in Action Spring 2004 (20:2) Developments in DemocracyīRIA 20:2 Home | How Women Won the Right to Vote | Have Women Achieved Equality? | Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau on Government Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau on Government
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