Abstract
As two of the fundamental social contract theorists, Hobbes and Locke are very often opposed, on prima facia readings ; for the former appears as a true defender of authoritarianism, with all its possible derives, while the latter supports a genuinely liberal idea of limited government. However, though this view is generally true, it is misleading, for it fails to give real access the most basic elements by which each of them gets to his final conviction, and (it is sometimes argued) exaggerates the distance between their doctrines. To understand the true respective meanings of Hobbes's and Locke's political theories thus requires to perceive the most fundamental differences in their views of the natural condition of man – that is, as both of them put it, of the condition of man in the state of nature. We shall then try to show, from the baldest acknowledgment of those differences in their pictures of the state of nature, how they relate to some most precise differences in their pictures of man as such, in that state.
At the most general level, the differences arising from the comparison of the Hobbesian and the Lockean notions of the state of nature are striking : while Locke defines ‘his' state of nature as ‘a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation'3, Hobbes speaks of his as a condition of ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death' in which ‘the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.
