Freedom in Society, Part 2

Last time we took a look at the inception of social contract theory in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes taught that civilization required a bargain between people and government wherein citizens give up some freedom to do as they wish and live under legal authority in order to enjoy some security. The ruler enforces order and the people obey the laws. Once such a civil society is established, he believed, the bond is irrevocable.

John Locke accepted the premises of Hobbes' argument for the necessity of giving up some freedom in exchange for security but came at the question from a little different angle. In his Second Treatise of Government, written in 1690, Locke asked some new questions. What interests would have been so essential to a people that they would have yielded some of their freedom of action in order to see that these were protected? Locke came up with three such interests, which he termed the "natural rights." He identified life, liberty and property as these three rights.

But where Hobbes saw submission to lawful authority a one-time event which bound people to obedience thereafter, Locke saw a reciprocal social contract. In his view the governmental authority was established to safeguard the three natural rights. The government was responsible for protecting the citizens' lives from foreign armies or murderers, their liberties from oppressors or kidnappers and their property from thieves. The citizens were obliged in return to obey laws against murder, kidnapping and thievery. Now if a citizen "broke the contract" and stole, then the government could rightfully take away that person's rights by imprisonment, for instance.

That was as far as Hobbes went. But Locke asked, what if the government was the one taking or failing to preserve its people's lives, oppressing their liberties or despoiling their property? In that case, he declared, it was the one breaking the contract and the people would have the right to replace it and establish a new one to better preserve their natural rights. Locke thus made the social contract mutual and reciprocal. The check on the people was to obey the law and the check on the government was to serve their interests.

Where Hobbes' one-sided social contract served as a justification for constitutional monarchy, Locke's formulation instead promoted liberal democracy as the preferred structure to protect liberty under law. That is liberal in the original sense of liberal meaning freedom, a democracy in which civil liberties are protected.

It is in the Lockean sense, of course, that the founding ethic of the United States was established. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson echoes Locke in the, "inalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and in holding that, "when a long train of abuses" has proven the government remiss in its part of the bargain that the citizens may of right, "erect new safeguards for their future security." In other words, they may change it or even overthrow it violently if there is no other recourse.

I'll explore some further ramifications for rights and the state in my next post.