Comparing Hobbesian and Lockean Foundations of Legitimacy

Hobbes and Locke share a common method — deriving the legitimacy of political authority from a hypothetical prior condition without government and from an act, or acts, of consent by which individuals leave that condition — yet they arrive at strikingly different conclusions at almost every step. Their starting anthropologies diverge first: Hobbes's state of nature is, by the logic of rough equality, competition, diffidence, and glory, driven necessarily toward a state of war, making political authority an urgent remedy for an intolerable condition, whereas Locke's state of nature, governed already by the law of reason, is a livable if inconvenient condition, so that government becomes a matter of practical improvement — better adjudication, better enforcement — rather than of sheer survival. This difference in the initial description of nature drives most of what follows in each system.