Chapter 2: The Origin of the State
On the morning of 20 January 1649, a king was brought into Westminster Hall to be tried.
Charles I had ruled England for twenty-four years. A civil war between the king’s supporters and Parliament’s armies had ended with his defeat and capture. Now a special court, created by what was left of the House of Commons, sat waiting to hear the charge against him.
Charles refused to answer it. He did not deny that there had been a war. He denied that the court had any right to put him on trial at all. A king, he insisted, received his authority from God, and no assembly of his own subjects could sit in judgement over him. The judges replied that a king holds his office on trust from the people, and that Charles had broken that trust by making war on them.
Notice what the two sides were not arguing about. They agreed on the facts. They disagreed about where political authority comes from — from above, or from below.
The court found him guilty. On 30 January 1649 Charles I was executed outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, in London. Two years later Thomas Hobbes, who had left England for Paris as the fighting began, published Leviathan — a book about why people obey any ruler at all.
That is the question this chapter is about.
Diagram
Fig. 2.0-1 Caption: Two answers to one question: does authority come down to the ruler, or up from the ruled? Brief: Two side-by-side panels of equal size. Left panel labelled ‘Authority from above’: three stacked bands — God at the top, ruler in the middle, people at the base — with a single broad arrow pointing downward from top band to bottom. Right panel labelled ‘Authority from below’: a wide band of many small figures at the base, an arrow rising from them to a single band labelled ‘ruler’ above. No faces, no crowns, no religious symbols of any faith; use plain geometric bands and neutral labels only.
2.1 Asking How The State Began
Everyone reading this page lives inside a state. It runs the courts, collects the taxes, issues the passports and sets the age at which you may vote.
Nobody signed a form to join it. You were born into a territory that already had a government, and that government’s laws already applied to you.
This is an odd arrangement, and thinkers have puzzled over it for a very long time. Where did this institution come from, and what gives it the right to command people who never agreed to it?
The previous chapter set out what a state is — a population, living in a defined territory, under a government, possessing sovereignty, which is the supreme law-making power within that territory. This chapter asks a different kind of question. Not what the state is, but how it came to exist, and on what basis it may demand obedience.
2.1.2 The Theories In Outline
The syllabus sets down two theories of the origin of the state, and it is worth seeing the shape of both before studying either in detail.
The Divine Origin Theory holds that the state was created by God, and that the ruler governs as God’s chosen agent on earth. It is the older of the two by many centuries, and it was the settled answer across much of the ancient and medieval world.
The Social Contract Theory holds that the state was created by human beings themselves. On this view, people once lived without any common government, found that condition unsatisfactory, and agreed among themselves to place their affairs under a common authority.
The second theory is a deliberate rejection of the first. It moves the source of authority from heaven to the people, and it made its way into political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Those three thinkers, as the rest of this chapter shows, agree on the method and disagree about almost everything else — about what people are like, about what the agreement contained, and about what happens when a ruler breaks it.
2.2 The Divine Origin Theory
2.2.1 Meaning And Historical Setting
The Divine Origin Theory holds that the state was created by the will of God, and that the ruler governs as the one whom God has chosen.
On this account the state is not a human invention at all. It was not designed by clever men, nor bargained into existence, nor built up by conquest. It was established by God for the good of humankind, and rulers hold their office as a trust from God.
This is the oldest answer to the question of origin, and for most of recorded history it was simply the ordinary answer.
Where The Idea Took Root
The theory belongs to societies in which religion was not one department of life but the frame around all of it. Kingship and priesthood often overlapped; the same authority that explained the harvest also explained the throne.
In ancient Egypt the pharaoh was regarded as divine, and was described as the son of the sun god Ra. In Babylon, in the eighteenth century BCE, the stone pillar carrying Hammurabi’s code of laws shows the king standing before Shamash, the sun god associated with justice.
In Indian political thought the Manu Smriti, an ancient Sanskrit text on law and conduct, describes the king as created to protect the people and to uphold dharma — the moral and social order that holds a society together. Much later, Mughal emperors used the title Zill-i-Ilahi, meaning ‘Shadow of God’, which claimed both worldly and sacred standing for the throne.
In medieval Europe the connection was made visible at the coronation itself, where a monarch was anointed and crowned by the Church.
These are very different civilisations, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. What they share is a single structure of argument: authority descends from a divine source to the ruler, and from the ruler to the ruled.
2.2.2 Features Of The Divine Origin Theory
The theory can be set out as a small number of connected claims. Each one follows from the one before it, which is what makes the doctrine so difficult to argue with from the inside.
The state is a sacred institution. It is the product of divine will, not of human intelligence, agreement or conquest. Because God established it, the state is not merely useful; it is holy, and belonging to it is a spiritual condition as much as a political one.
The ruler is God’s representative on earth. The king does not merely occupy an office; he stands between the divine and human worlds, entrusted with maintaining law, justice and moral order. His commands therefore carry an authority that no ordinary human command can carry.
The ruler is accountable to God alone. No assembly, court or body of subjects may sit in judgement on him, because none of them gave him his authority. This does not mean he may do as he likes. He is held to be answerable — but upwards, at a tribunal no earthly institution can convene.
The right to rule is hereditary and indefeasible. The crown descends by birth within the line God has appointed. Because the right comes from God, it cannot be cancelled, transferred or voted away by any human act, however popular.
Obedience is a religious duty and resistance is a sin. Disobeying the ruler is not simply breaking a law. It is defying the God who placed him there, which moves rebellion out of the courts and into the territory of blasphemy.
Religious texts and institutions supply the sanction. The doctrine did not float free. It was preached, taught and written down, and religious authority was regularly invoked to confirm that the throne rested on divine appointment.
The fifth feature is the load-bearing one, and it is worth seeing the kind of text on which it was built. The passage below, from a letter written in the first century CE and long used in Christian political teaching, was quoted in Europe for centuries to establish that obedience to rulers is owed to God.
Read the passage carefully. It does not say that rulers are good, or wise, or chosen well. It says that the power they hold has a divine source, and that subjects are therefore bound to submit to it.
That is what made the verse so serviceable to monarchy. If the office is ordained by God, the duty of obedience does not depend on the character of the person occupying it.
Notice also what the passage cannot tell us. It records what was taught about obedience; it does not record whether ordinary people accepted the teaching, or how often they quietly ignored it.
Nor can a single text settle the question by itself. Religious texts have been read in more than one way, and other passages have been used, in later centuries, to argue that an unjust ruler forfeits obedience. A source shows us an argument in circulation, not the end of a debate.
2.2.3 The Doctrine Of The Divine Right Of Kings
In early modern Europe the theory hardened into its sharpest and most political form. The divine right of kings is the doctrine that a monarch receives authority directly from God, holds it by hereditary and indefeasible right, and answers to God alone rather than to any earthly authority.
It is usually stated as four propositions: that monarchy is divinely ordained; that hereditary right is indefeasible; that kings are accountable to God alone; and that resistance to a lawful king is a sin.
Read those four together and their combined effect is plain. Between the king and God there is nothing — no parliament, no court, no body of subjects with standing to intervene.
The doctrine was not merely court flattery. It was argued for in print by serious writers, and one of them is worth knowing about, because a famous reply to him appears later in this chapter.
In France the doctrine found its most confident expression at the court of Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715 and made the French monarchy the model of absolute rule in Europe. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, a bishop and tutor to the king’s son, defended royal authority as sacred and answerable to God alone.
Seen from the throne and seen from below, the same doctrine looked very different — though both views rested on the same foundation.
That last point is the one to carry forward. Everything in the divine origin account depends on authority coming from outside and above human society.
The theory examined next begins by denying exactly that.
2.4 Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who spent much of his life close to political power and to political danger. He served for years as a tutor to the young prince who later became Charles II, and he wrote during the most violent decade in English history.
His major work of political philosophy, Leviathan, was published in 1651. Its title is the name of a great sea creature mentioned in the Bible, chosen to convey the size and strength of the power he thought a state must have.
Hobbes is the first of the three contract thinkers, and in one respect the most surprising. He begins from consent, the most modern of foundations, and arrives at absolute power, the most traditional of conclusions.
2.4.1 Human Nature And The State Of Nature
Everything in Hobbes follows from his account of what human beings are like, so it is the place to start.
People, in his view, are driven by desire and above all by the desire to stay alive. They are not wicked, but they are not naturally cooperative either; each pursues personal gain, and each fears what others may do.
Hobbes adds a claim that does most of the work. In natural capacity, human beings are roughly equal — the weakest can kill the strongest by cunning or by joining with others. Equality of this kind produces not harmony but insecurity, because nobody is safe by strength alone.
Life Without A Common Power
Now imagine such people with no government over them. There are no laws, no courts and, crucially, no common judge whom everyone accepts.
In that condition each person must decide for himself what he needs and how far he may go to get it. Everyone has a right to everything, which means, in practice, secure possession of nothing.
The result is what Hobbes calls a condition of war of every man against every man. War here does not mean constant fighting; it means the constant known readiness to fight, in which no one can afford to trust anyone.
Hobbes described the consequences in a phrase that has outlived nearly everything else written in that century.
Look closely at the list. ‘Poor’, ‘nasty’ and ‘short’ describe how badly life goes. ‘Solitary’ and ‘brutish’ describe something else — the absence of the settled cooperation that makes anything better than bare survival possible.
That is Hobbes’s real point. Without a common power there is no industry, no cultivation, no trade and no knowledge, because no one can count on keeping what he produces.
Notice also what the passage cannot do. It is a vivid claim about a condition Hobbes never observed, and vividness is not evidence. Whether human beings without government would in fact behave this way is exactly what his critics denied, and a memorable sentence does not settle it.
2.4.2 The Hobbesian Contract
Reason, Hobbes argues, shows people the way out. They want peace, and peace requires that everyone lay down the unlimited right to do as he judges best.
But nobody will disarm first while others remain armed. So the surrender must be simultaneous, complete, and enforced by a power strong enough to frighten anyone tempted to defect.
The contract is therefore an agreement among the individuals themselves. Each says to every other, in effect: I give up my right of governing myself to this man or this assembly, on condition that you do the same.
Who Is Not A Party To The Contract
This is the step that decides everything that follows. The sovereign — the person or assembly to whom the right of governing is transferred — does not sign the agreement.
The sovereign is created by the contract, not bound within it. Since the ruler has promised nothing, the ruler can break nothing, and no subject can claim a breach as ground for withdrawing consent.
What is created is absolute sovereignty: power that is unlimited by law, indivisible, and not answerable to any other authority. Law, for Hobbes, simply is the command of the sovereign.
One limit survives. Since people entered the agreement to preserve their lives, no one can be obliged to surrender his own life, and a person may resist when his life is directly threatened. The right of self-preservation is the one thing the contract cannot take away.
Hobbes preferred that this power be held by a monarch, believing a single will is less liable to division than an assembly. But his argument does not depend on it: any holder of undivided supreme power would serve.
2.4.3 Features Of Hobbes’s Theory
The main features of Hobbes’s version of the social contract can be stated as follows.
Human nature is self-interested. People are driven by desire, by fear and above all by the wish to preserve themselves, and they are equal enough in power for none to be safe alone.
The state of nature is a state of war. It is pre-social as well as pre-political: there is no society, no justice, no property and no industry, and life is short and insecure.
Natural right in that condition is unlimited and worthless. A right to everything gives secure possession of nothing, so the right must be given up to become useful.
The contract is made among individuals. Each surrenders his right of self-government to a common authority, on condition that all others do the same at the same moment.
The sovereign is not a party to the contract. The ruler is created by the agreement rather than bound by it, and therefore cannot be accused of breaking it.
The surrender is complete and permanent. Every right is transferred except the right to preserve one’s own life, and the transfer cannot be revoked.
Sovereignty is absolute, indivisible and inalienable. It cannot be limited by law, shared between organs, or taken back by those who conferred it, and law is the sovereign’s command.
There is no right of revolt. Even an unjust ruler must be obeyed, because the alternative is a return to the state of war.
The contract is social and political at once. A single agreement creates society and government together, since for Hobbes there was no society before the state.
The justification is secular. Absolute power is defended by reasoning about human interest and survival, with no appeal to divine appointment at any point.
Feature ten is easily missed and historically important. Hobbes defended a power as complete as any king had ever claimed, yet he defended it on entirely human ground — and in doing so he moved the whole argument onto the terrain where his critics could meet him.
The first of those critics is the subject of the next section.
2.5 John Locke
John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher and physician who began from the same starting point as Hobbes and ended almost as far from him as it is possible to get.
His political argument appears in Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689. The first of the two treatises is the reply promised earlier in this chapter: a sustained demolition of the claim that kings inherit a fatherly authority granted by God. Having cleared that ground, Locke used the second treatise to build his own account from consent.
The book appeared immediately after the events of 1688, and was read for generations afterwards as their justification.
2.5.1 Human Nature And The State Of Nature
Locke’s people are not Hobbes’s people. They are rational, capable of cooperation, and able to recognise obligations towards one another without being frightened into it.
This is not a claim that human beings are perfect. It is a claim that they can reason, and that reason gives them access to a standard of conduct that exists independently of any government.
That standard is natural law — the moral rules that reason discovers, binding on human beings whether or not any state has enacted them. Locke states its central requirement plainly.
Two things follow from this short sentence, and they shape everything after it.
First, obligations exist before the state does. In Locke’s state of nature people are free and equal, but freedom is not licence: they are already bound not to injure one another.
Second, the list itself matters. Life, health, liberty and possessions are held by people in their own right, not granted to them by any ruler.
These are what Locke calls natural rights — entitlements that belong to individuals by their nature as human beings, before and independently of the state. A government that takes them away is not exercising authority but destroying the reason it exists.
Why Anything Was Wrong At All
If natural law binds and people are reasonable, the obvious question is what the state of nature lacked. Locke’s answer is careful, and it is quite different from a war of all against all.
His state of nature is pre-political but not pre-social. People live in families, keep promises, work land and exchange goods. What they do not have is any common authority to settle disputes.
He identifies three specific wants. There is no settled, known law that everyone accepts as the standard. There is no impartial judge to decide cases between them. And there is no reliable power to carry out a decision once it has been given.
The trouble is not that people are wicked but that each is judge in his own cause. A man wronged must decide for himself what was done, how serious it was, and what punishment is fair — and he will tend to decide generously in his own favour.
So Locke calls the state of nature a condition of inconvenience rather than of war. It is liveable but unreliable, and quarrels that could have been settled easily may escalate for want of anyone with the standing to end them.
2.5.2 The Two Contracts
Because the problem is narrower than Hobbes’s, the remedy is narrower too. People do not need to hand over everything; they need to hand over the one thing that is causing the difficulty.
Locke’s account is usually presented as two agreements rather than one, and the distinction repays attention.
The first agreement creates civil society — a community whose members consent to be bound together as one body and to accept the decision of the majority. Society, on this view, comes into being before any government does.
The second agreement establishes the government itself. Here Locke’s language is deliberate: the community does not surrender its power but entrusts it, placing authority in the hands of rulers on condition that they use it to protect the rights the community already held.
What is given up is precise. Each person surrenders the right to interpret natural law for himself and to punish those who break it. Life, liberty and property are not surrendered at all.
Government On Trust
Once power is held on trust, everything that Hobbes ruled out becomes possible. A trustee can fail. A trustee can be judged. And a trustee who abuses the trust can be removed.
Locke therefore argues for limited government. Rulers are bound by settled, published laws that apply equally to all, and the law-making body, though supreme among the organs of government, is itself limited by the purpose for which it was created.
He also separates the powers of government into three: the legislative, which makes law; the executive, which enforces it; and the federative, which handles war, peace and dealings with other states. No single branch is to hold all of it.
If the trust is broken — if rulers govern by arbitrary will, seize property or set themselves above the law — authority returns to the people, who may establish a new government in its place.
2.5.3 Features Of Locke’s Theory
The main features of Locke’s version of the social contract can be stated as follows.
Human nature is rational and social. People are capable of cooperation and of recognising obligations, and are not driven by fear and appetite alone.
The state of nature is pre-political but not pre-social. It is a condition of liberty and equality governed by natural law, in which families, promises and property already exist.
It is a state of inconvenience, not of war. What is missing is a settled known law, an impartial judge and a reliable power to enforce decisions.
Natural rights precede the state. Life, liberty and property belong to individuals by nature, are not granted by government, and cannot be surrendered.
There are two agreements. The first creates civil society; the second establishes a government, which holds its power as a trust from that society.
The surrender is partial. Only the individual right to interpret and enforce natural law is given up, which is exactly what the difficulty required.
Government is limited and conditional. It must rule by settled public laws directed at the common good, and its authority lasts only while it serves the purpose for which it was created.
Consent is the basis of authority, and the majority decides. Legitimate power comes from the agreement of the governed, given directly or through their representatives.
Powers are separated. Locke divides government into legislative, executive and federative powers so that no single body holds all of them.
There is a right of revolt. When rulers break the trust, power reverts to the community, which may set up a new government in place of the old.
Feature ten is where the two English contract theorists finally divide. Both begin from individuals consenting for their own protection; only one leaves the people any remedy when protection fails.
The third of the contract thinkers accepted neither answer, and rebuilt the argument from a different question altogether.
2.6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva, a small independent republic in what is now Switzerland, and spent much of his working life in France. That combination shaped everything he wrote about politics.
He knew, from Geneva, a city small enough for citizens to assemble and decide matters themselves. He then lived in a kingdom where a few thousand nobles and clergy held privileges, and where the great majority — the commoners, known as the Third Estate — carried the taxes and held no political power at all.
His major political work, The Social Contract, was published in 1762. Its first sentence is probably the most quoted line in the history of political thought.
The chains are not literal. Rousseau means the whole apparatus of laws, ranks, obligations and inequalities that people are born into and did not choose.
Read the sentence carefully, though, because it is easy to misread. Rousseau is not saying that all chains should be struck off, and he is not recommending a return to the forest. His question is which chains can be made legitimate, and by what.
Notice also what a famous sentence cannot do. It states a contrast in nine words and proves nothing; the argument that people are naturally free, and that some forms of authority can be justified while others cannot, has still to be made. A slogan is where an argument begins, not where it ends.
2.6.1 The State Of Nature And The Rise Of Inequality
Rousseau’s account of the state of nature had appeared earlier, in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, published in 1755.
His natural human being is solitary and self-sufficient, wandering, easily satisfied, with few needs and no settled attachments. There is no property, no competition and no comparison, because there is nothing yet to compare.
Such people are not guided by reason, which Rousseau treats as a later development. They are guided by amour de soi, a simple self-love concerned with staying alive, and by pitié, a natural reluctance to see another creature suffer.
Two conclusions follow, and both are direct rejections of Hobbes. The state of nature is not a state of war, because people have no reason to fight over things they do not yet want. And human beings are naturally good — not virtuous, since they know nothing of right and wrong, but harmless.
How A Peaceful Condition Went Wrong
If the natural condition was so tolerable, what ruined it? Rousseau’s answer is unusual among these thinkers, because for him the corruption is caused by society itself and not by human nature.
As numbers grew, people settled, cooperated and began to live in view of one another. Reason developed, and with it comparison: who is stronger, who is admired, who has more.
The decisive step was private property. Once land could be enclosed and called mine, the differences between people became permanent, inheritable and enforceable.
This is why Rousseau is so different in tone from Locke. For Locke, property is a natural right the state exists to protect. For Rousseau, property is the point at which inequality entered the world.
But he does not conclude that society was a mistake. Human beings cannot go back, and would lose their moral capacities if they did. The task is to find a form of association that restores in law the equality that has been lost in fact.
2.6.2 The Contract And The General Will
Rousseau’s contract is not an agreement between the people and a ruler. There is no ruler in it at all.
Each person places himself and all his powers under the direction of the community as a whole. The surrender is complete, as in Hobbes — but because everyone gives himself equally and to everybody, nobody is placed under any particular master.
That is the whole trick of the argument. Give yourself to one man and you are his subject. Give yourself to all, on identical terms, and you have simply become a member of a body of which you are yourself a part.
The individual therefore appears twice. As a member of the sovereign body he helps make the law; as a subject he obeys it. He is both author and addressee of every rule he lives under.
The General Will
The community’s decisions are made by what Rousseau calls the general will — the will of the citizen body directed towards the common good, as distinct from the private interests of its members.
He distinguishes it sharply from the will of all, which is merely the sum of individual preferences added together. A hundred people each voting for what suits themselves produce a total; they do not produce a general will.
The general will asks a different question of the citizen. Not ‘what do I want?’ but ‘what is good for us as a body?’ — and Rousseau holds that a citizen who votes on the second question is genuinely free, even when the decision goes against his own preference.
This is what allows him to claim that obedience and freedom are compatible. Natural liberty is doing whatever you can. Civil liberty is obeying a law you had a hand in making, which Rousseau regards as the only freedom worth having.
From the general will follows popular sovereignty, the doctrine that supreme authority belongs to the people as a whole. It cannot be transferred to a king, and it cannot be divided among organs, because a will that has been handed over is no longer yours.
For the same reason Rousseau distrusts representation and favours direct democracy, a system in which citizens make the laws themselves instead of choosing others to make laws for them. A people that votes only to elect representatives, he argues, is free on polling day and governed for the rest of the term.
One line in The Social Contract has troubled readers ever since. Rousseau writes that a citizen who refuses to obey the general will may be compelled to do so by the whole body — and that this means he will be forced to be free.
2.6.3 Features Of Rousseau’s Theory
The main features of Rousseau’s version of the social contract can be stated as follows.
Human beings are naturally good. Corruption comes from society and its institutions, not from anything in human nature itself.
The state of nature is peaceful. People are solitary, self-sufficient and guided by self-love and pity rather than by reason, and there is no war of all against all.
Inequality is a social product. It begins with settlement, comparison and above all private property, and is then made permanent by law.
The contract is made among all the members together. Each gives himself and his powers to the whole community, and nobody is placed under any particular individual.
The surrender is total but equal. Because every member gives up the same on the same terms, no one loses anything relative to anyone else.
Sovereignty belongs to the people. It is inalienable and indivisible: it cannot be handed to a monarch, and it cannot be split among separate holders.
The general will directs the state. Law is legitimate only when it expresses the common good, and must apply generally rather than to particular persons.
The general will is not the will of all. It is not a count of private preferences, and a majority pursuing private interests does not express it.
Freedom is obedience to self-made law. Civil liberty replaces natural liberty, and the citizen is free because he is author of the rules he obeys.
Direct participation is preferred to representation. Citizens are to make law themselves, and arbitrary or hereditary authority is rejected in every form.
Rousseau’s argument thus turns the contract into something the other two never intended. For Hobbes it produced a sovereign above the people, and for Locke a government answerable to them. For Rousseau the people are the sovereign, and there is nobody above them at all.
2.7 Hobbes, Locke And Rousseau Compared
Three writers, one method, three destinations. It is worth ending the chapter by setting the accounts side by side, because the disagreements are as instructive as the shared framework.
What The Three Agree On
Start with the common ground, which is more substantial than it looks. All three reject divine appointment and hereditary right as the source of authority.
All three begin from individuals rather than from kingdoms, tribes or churches, and all three treat the state as something that has to be justified to those individuals.
And all three use the same instrument: imagine life without government, identify what is missing, and explain the state as the answer. The method is identical in each case.
Where They Divide
The first divergence is over human nature, and it decides much of what follows. Hobbes’s people are competitive and fearful; Locke’s are reasonable and capable of obligation; Rousseau’s are simple, harmless and later corrupted by the society they build.
The second divergence follows from the first. Hobbes’s state of nature is a state of war in which nothing can be built. Locke’s is a workable society lacking only a settled law, an impartial judge and reliable enforcement. Rousseau’s is an age of rough equality that ends when property begins.
The third divergence is about what people hand over. Hobbes requires everything but the right to stay alive. Locke requires only the right to judge and punish in one’s own case. Rousseau requires everything — but to the whole community, and on terms identical for everybody.
The fourth divergence is the practical one: who ends up holding the power. In Hobbes it is a sovereign who never joined the agreement and therefore cannot break it. In Locke it is a government holding authority on trust from the community. In Rousseau it is the people themselves, who never part with sovereignty at all.
From this the last difference follows directly. Hobbes leaves no right of resistance, Locke makes resistance the remedy for a broken trust, and Rousseau makes the question hardly arise, because the sovereign body and the citizens are the same body.
Why The Same Argument Ended In Three Places
A student meeting this material for the first time usually asks the obvious question: if the method is the same, why are the conclusions so far apart?
Part of the answer lies in the opening assumption. Because the state of nature is imagined rather than observed, whatever is built into it comes out again at the end. Put fear in at the start and you will need a sovereign strong enough to end fear; put reason in and a limited government will do.
Part of the answer lies in what each writer was afraid of. Hobbes had watched a kingdom collapse into civil war and feared disorder above everything. Locke was defending a parliament’s right to remove a king and feared unaccountable power. Rousseau was looking at a society of entrenched privilege and feared inequality.
Neither explanation cancels the other, and there is no need to choose between them. Political arguments are usually built from both a view of human nature and a fear about the present.
The Question That Remains Open
What survives from all this is not a settled answer but a permanently live question. If authority rests on consent, how much power may be created, and what remedy remains when it is misused?
Hobbes answers that the remedy is worse than the disease. Locke answers that a power without a remedy is not a trust but a licence. Rousseau answers that the question dissolves only when the people keep sovereignty in their own hands.
Every one of these positions is still argued today, in constitutional courts, in parliaments and in the streets. That is the reason a chapter about how the state began is not really a chapter about the past.
2.8 Summary
Power is the ability to make someone comply; authority is the recognised right to command. Legitimacy is the belief that this right is rightful, and from it follows political obligation, the citizen’s duty to obey.
A theory of the state’s origin is therefore also a theory of authority. It settles whom the ruler answers to, and what remedy, if any, the ruled possess.
The Divine Origin Theory holds that the state was created by God and that the ruler governs as the one God has chosen. Authority descends from above, and the state is sacred rather than man-made.
The idea appeared independently across ancient Egypt, Babylon, India and medieval Europe, in societies where religion supplied the frame for explaining the world, including the throne.
Its features are connected: the state is sacred; the ruler is God’s representative; he is accountable to God alone; the right is hereditary and indefeasible; obedience is a religious duty and resistance a sin; and religious texts and institutions supply the sanction.
The fifth of these does the heaviest work. Once disobedience is sin, opposition is not a political demand to be answered but a wrong to be punished, and no earthly remedy against a bad ruler remains.
In early modern Europe the theory hardened into the divine right of kings, stated as four propositions: monarchy is divinely ordained; hereditary right is indefeasible; kings answer to God alone; and resistance to a lawful king is a sin.
The Social Contract Theory reverses the direction of authority. The state is a human creation, made by people who left a condition without government and agreed to place a common authority over themselves.
It rose in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe as feudalism declined, as rival churches made divine sanction a weaker argument, as Enlightenment thought placed its confidence in reason, and as a commercial class demanded predictable law.
The idea is older and not only European. Kautilya’s Arthashastra records people afflicted by matsya nyaya choosing a king, agreeing to give a sixth of their grain and a tenth of their merchandise in return for protection.
Every version is built in three moves: a state of nature without government, a difficulty that cannot be solved from within it, and a contract in which some freedom is surrendered to create a common authority.
Its features are shared across all three thinkers: the state is human and purposive; authority rests on the consent of the governed; the surrender is made for protection; the individual precedes the state; the reasoning is secular; and theorists dispute whether the contract ever actually happened.
Hobbes begins from fear. Human beings are self-interested and roughly equal in power, so a condition without a common judge becomes a war of every man against every man, in which industry and security are impossible.
His contract is made among individuals and not with the ruler. The sovereign is created by it, is not a party to it, and therefore cannot break it — which is why the surrender is permanent and there is no right of revolt.
Hobbesian sovereignty is absolute, indivisible and inalienable, and law is the sovereign’s command. The single limit is self-preservation, the purpose for which the contract was made. The whole defence is secular.
Locke begins from natural law, the moral standard reason discovers before any state exists, and from natural rights to life, liberty and property that individuals hold in their own right.
His state of nature is pre-political but social, and is inconvenient rather than warlike. It wants a settled known law, an impartial judge and a reliable power to enforce decisions, because each person is otherwise judge in his own cause.
Locke’s remedy is correspondingly narrow: a first agreement creates civil society, a second establishes government as a trust, and only the right to judge and punish is surrendered. Government is limited, its powers separated into legislative, executive and federative, and a broken trust returns authority to the people.
Rousseau begins from equality. Human beings are naturally good and their state of nature is peaceful; inequality enters with settlement, comparison and above all private property, and law then makes it permanent.
His contract is made with the whole community rather than with any ruler. Because each gives himself entirely and on identical terms, no one falls under any particular master, and every citizen is both author and subject of the law.
The community is directed by the general will, aimed at the common good and distinct from the will of all, which is merely the sum of private preferences. Sovereignty is popular, inalienable and indivisible, and Rousseau prefers direct participation to representation.
Freedom, for Rousseau, is obedience to laws one has helped make. His claim that a citizen may be forced to be free has been read both as a defence of civic freedom and as a licence for coercion.
The three share a method and diverge at every step within it — over human nature, over what the state of nature lacks, over how much is surrendered, over who holds power afterwards, and over whether the people may take it back.
Because the state of nature is imagined and not observed, what is built into it reappears in the conclusion. Each writer also feared something different: Hobbes disorder, Locke unaccountable power, Rousseau entrenched inequality.
The Arguments In One Place
The chapter’s central claim is that political authority has to be explained on human terms, and that the social contract tradition does this by grounding obedience in the consent of the governed.
Against it stands the older account, in which authority descends from God to the ruler and is not open to human judgement at all. Its strength was never merely religious: it gave societies a source of obligation that no faction could rewrite.
The strongest objection to the contract account is that no such agreement ever took place, and that consent is extremely hard to locate in any actual state.
The contract theorists’ reply is that the argument was never a history. It asks what a state would have to be like for reasonable people to have agreed to it — and that question can be put to any government now living.
2.9 Key Terms
Absolute sovereignty — supreme power that is unlimited by law, indivisible, and answerable to no other authority.
Authority — the recognised right to give commands, so that obedience is owed and not merely extracted by force.
Civil society — in Locke’s account, the community formed when individuals consent to be bound together as one body, before any government is established.
Consent of the governed — the agreement of the people to be ruled, which the contract theorists treat as the only thing that makes authority rightful.
Direct democracy — a system in which citizens make the laws themselves rather than choosing representatives to make laws for them.
Divine Origin Theory — the theory that the state was created by God and that the ruler governs as the one God has chosen.
Divine right of kings — the doctrine that a monarch receives authority directly from God, holds it by indefeasible hereditary right, and answers to God alone.
General will — in Rousseau’s account, the will of the whole citizen body directed towards the common good, as distinct from the sum of private preferences.
Legitimacy — the widely held belief that a ruler’s authority is rightful and that its commands therefore deserve obedience.
Natural law — the moral rules that reason discovers, binding on human beings whether or not any state has enacted them.
Natural rights — entitlements such as life, liberty and property that belong to individuals by their nature, before and independently of the state.
Political obligation — the duty of a citizen to obey the laws of the state.
Popular sovereignty — the doctrine that supreme authority belongs to the people as a whole and cannot be transferred or divided.
Social contract — an agreement among people to give up part of their natural freedom and place themselves under a common authority, in return for order and security.
Social Contract Theory — the theory that the state was created by human beings through such an agreement, and not by divine will.
State of nature — an imagined condition of human life before government, law or any common authority existed.
2.10 Points to Ponder
If the social contract never actually took place, can it still explain why anyone ought to obey the law today?
Hobbes and Rousseau both ask people to surrender everything, yet they end in opposite places. Does it matter more what is surrendered, or to whom it is surrendered?
Locke holds that a government which breaks its trust may be removed. Who is competent to judge that the trust has been broken, and what follows when people disagree about it?
Rousseau argues that a citizen who obeys a law he helped make is free. Is that equally true of a citizen who voted against that law?
The divine account offered societies a source of obligation that no faction could rewrite. What does a state founded on consent put in its place?
If whatever is built into the state of nature reappears in the conclusion, is a theory of origin really an argument — or a way of restating what the writer already believed?
2.11 Objective Questions
- According to the Divine Origin Theory, the state is—
- an agreement among individuals
- a creation of the will of God
- the result of conquest by the strong
- a growth of the family over time [1 mark]
- In Hobbes’s account, the state of nature is best described as—
- peaceful but inconvenient
- free, equal and simple
- a war of every man against every man
- governed by settled customary law [1 mark]
- In Locke’s social contract, what exactly does the individual surrender?
- All rights except the right to preserve his life
- His right to hold property
- His right to judge and punish in his own cause
- Nothing at all [1 mark]
- The general will, in Rousseau’s theory, means—
- the total of what all individuals separately want
- the will of the citizen body directed at the common good
- the decision of the largest political party
- the command of the sovereign ruler [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): In Hobbes’s theory the sovereign cannot be accused of breaking the contract. Reason (R): The sovereign is created by the contract and is not a party to it.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): Locke describes the state of nature as a condition of inconvenience rather than of war. Reason (R): In Locke’s state of nature there is no settled known law, no impartial judge and no reliable power of enforcement.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match each thinker in Column A with his work in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Thomas Hobbes | i. The Social Contract |
| b. John Locke | ii. Leviathan |
| c. Jean-Jacques Rousseau | iii. Patriarcha |
| d. Sir Robert Filmer | iv. Two Treatises of Government |
Fill in the blank: Kautilya’s Arthashastra describes people afflicted by ____________ as choosing a king to protect them. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: In Locke’s account, government does not own its power but holds it as a ____________ from the community. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: According to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, a monarch is accountable to Parliament as well as to God. [1 mark]
2.12 Check Your Concepts
Define the state of nature. [2 marks]
State any two features of the Divine Origin Theory. [2 marks]
Differentiate between power and authority, giving one example of each. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why the Social Contract Theory gained ground in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how the Divine Origin Theory turned political opposition into a religious offence. [4 marks]
Explain the account of the origin of kingship given in Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and state what makes it contractual in form. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that the state of nature is a description of an actual historical period. [4 marks]
Describe the main features of Hobbes’s social contract theory, and explain why it leaves the people no right of revolt. [6 marks]
Describe the two agreements in Locke’s theory, and explain how the idea of trust supports a right of resistance. [6 marks]
Explain Rousseau’s concept of the general will, distinguish it from the will of all, and state one difficulty raised by his claim that a citizen may be forced to be free. [6 marks]
2.13 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. A royal proclamation issued in a seventeenth-century kingdom declares that the king’s crown descends to him from his father by the arrangement of God; that he holds his throne of no man; that those who question his commands question the order of creation itself; and that the courts of the realm, being made by him, cannot sit in judgement upon him.
- Identify the theory of the origin of the state reflected in the proclamation.
- Point out any two features of that theory visible in the wording of the passage.
- What remedy, if any, does this account leave to subjects who believe the king has governed badly? Give a reason for your answer. [2+2+2 = 6 marks]
- Study the description of the cartoon and answer the questions that follow. A cartoon shows an enormous seated figure labelled ‘Sovereign’, holding a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. On closer inspection the figure’s body is made up of hundreds of tiny human figures packed together. At the base, one small figure is trying to climb out and is being held in place by the figures around him.
- Which thinker’s account of the state does the cartoon illustrate? Justify your answer with one detail from the description.
- What is the exaggeration in the drawing doing, and what claim is the cartoonist making through it?
- State one thing about that thinker’s theory which this cartoon cannot show. [2+2+2 = 6 marks]
- Read the situation and answer the questions that follow. A residential colony has no elected committee. Each family decides for itself how much water to draw and where to park, and disputes are settled by whoever argues loudest. After a quarrel over a blocked lane, the residents meet and agree to elect a five-member committee with clearly listed powers, and they write down that the committee may be replaced by a general meeting if it exceeds those powers.
- Whose account of the origin of political authority does this situation most closely resemble? Give one reason.
- State exactly what the residents have given up, and what they have kept.
- Mention one important respect in which a colony committee is not a good analogy for the state. [2+2+2 = 6 marks]
- Read the situation and answer the questions that follow. In a small village every adult resident attends an open assembly that makes the village rules. At one meeting the assembly decides that the common pond will be closed to fishing for six months so that the stock can recover. A fisherman who voted against the rule says that since he did not agree to it, it does not bind him.
- How would Rousseau answer the fisherman? Explain your answer with reference to the general will.
- Distinguish, using this example, between the general will and the will of all.
- State one objection that can be raised against Rousseau’s answer. [2+2+2 = 6 marks]