There is considerable debate about whether his conception of natural law was more akin to that of Aquinas ( filtered through Richard Hooker ) or Hobbes ' radical reinterpretation, though the effect of Locke's understanding is usually phrased in terms of a revision of Hobbes upon Hobbesean contractualist grounds.

* Thomas Hobbes: Generally considered to have first articulated how the concept of a social contract that justifies the actions of rulers ( even where contrary to the individual desires of governed citizens ), can be reconciled with a conception of sovereignty.

John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes ' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state.

Locke is a slightly more ambiguous case than Hobbes because although his conception of liberty was largely negative ( in terms of non-interference ), he differed in that he courted the " republican " ( classical ) tradition of liberty by rejecting the notion that an individual could be free if he was under the arbitrary power of another:

In his treatise Leviathan, ( 1651 ), Hobbes expresses a view of natural law as a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same ; and to omit that by which he thinks it may best be preserved.

In Hobbes ' opinion, the only way natural law could prevail was for men to submit to the commands of the sovereign.

As used by Thomas Hobbes in his treatises Leviathan and De Cive, natural law is " a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same ; and to omit that by which he thinks it may best be preserved.

" Hobbes posits a primitive, unconnected state of nature in which men, having a " natural proclivity ... to hurt each other " also have " a Right to every thing, even to one anothers body "; and " nothing can be Unjust " in this " warre of every man against every man " in which human life is " solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

" As part of his campaign against the classical idea of natural human sociability, Hobbes inverts that fundamental natural legal maxim, the Golden Rule.

Liberal natural law grew out of the medieval Christian natural law theories and out of Hobbes ' revision of natural law, sometimes in an uneasy balance of the two.

Locke turned Hobbes ' prescription around, saying that if the ruler went against natural law and failed to protect " life, liberty, and property ," people could justifiably overthrow the existing state and create a new one.

According to Locke, an absolute ruler as proposed by Hobbes is unnecessary, for natural law is based on reason and seeking peace and survival for man.

A contemporary of Hobbes, James Harrington, reacted differently to the same tumult ; he considered property natural but not inevitable.

According to Locke, an absolute ruler as proposed by Hobbes is unnecessary, for natural law is based on reason and equality, seeking peace and survival for man.

Sharply contrarian on many subjects, Hobbes, like Bacon, also promoted a simpler and more natural style that used figures of speech sparingly.

Hobbes ' vision of the natural depravity of man inspired fervent disagreement among those who opposed absolute government.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men ( 1754 ), Rousseau maintained that man in a State of Nature had been a solitary, ape-like creature, who was not méchant ( bad ), as Hobbes had maintained, but ( like some other animals ) had an " innate repugnance to see others of his kind suffer " ( and this natural sympathy constituted the Natural Man's one-and-only natural virtue ).

Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes ( 1651 ), Samuel Pufendorf ( 1673 ), John Locke ( 1689 ), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( 1762 ) are among the most prominent of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theorists of social contract and natural rights.

Grotius posited that individual human beings had natural rights ; Hobbes asserted that men consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government ( whether monarchial or parliamentary ); Pufendorf disputed Hobbes's equation of a state of nature with war ; Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and that the rule of God therefore superseded government authority ; and Rousseau believed that democracy ( self-rule ) was the best way of ensuring the general welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law.

O ’ Neill believes that Hobbes ( who had instructed Charles in philosophy ) had significant influence on Cavendish ’ s natural philosophy and notes that Cavendish was among the few seventeenth century supporters of Hobbes ’ materialist philosophy, which argued that incorporeal souls do not exist in nature.

Hobbes argues that although some may be stronger or more intelligent than others in their natural state, none are so strong as to be beyond a fear of violent death, which justifies self-defense as the highest necessity.

* John Locke: Like Hobbes, described a social contract theory based on citizens ' fundamental rights in the state of nature.

According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short ", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the ' social ', or society.

In Natural Right and History Strauss begins with a critique of Max Weber's epistemology, briefly engages the relativism of Martin Heidegger ( who goes unnamed ), and continues with a discussion of the evolution of natural rights via an analysis of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

Thomas Hobbes ( 1588 – 1679 ) included a discussion of natural rights in his moral and political philosophy.

Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short ".

Hobbes objected to the attempt to derive rights from " natural law ," arguing that law (" lex ") and right (" jus ") though often confused, signify opposites, with law referring to obligations, while rights refer to the absence of obligations.

Thomas Hobbes ' Leviathan outlines a commonwealth based upon a monarchy to whom citizens have ceded their rights.

From this quote it is clear that Hobbes contended that people in a state of nature ceded their individual rights to create sovereignty, retained by the state, in return for their protection and a more functional society.

In his championship of the natural liberty and equality of all men, Antiphon anticipates the natural rights doctrine of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the Declaration of Independence.

Its main design is to combat the principles which Hobbes had promulgated as to the constitution of man, the nature of morality, and the origin of society, and to prove that self-advantage is not the chief end of man, that force is not the source of personal obligation to moral conduct nor the foundation of social rights, and that the state of nature is not a state of war.

The social contract theory, invented by Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau, were among the first to provide a political classification of rights, in particular through the notion of sovereignty and of natural rights.

Thornhump was not present when Bloom County was " sold " to Donald Trump in Bill the Cat's body, although he was later parodied in an editorial cartoon by Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson that attacked Breathed's penchant for allowing merchandising rights for his creations.

Hobbes said :" The Latines called Accounts of mony Rationes ... and thence it seems to proceed that they extended the word Ratio, to the faculty of Reckoning in all other things .... When a man reasoneth hee does nothing else but conceive a summe totall ... For Reason ... is nothing but Reckoning ... of the consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts ...."

Important empiricist who expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.

In Hobbes reasoning is the right process of drawing conclusions from definitions ( the " names agreed upon ").

" The words " Is, or Bee, or Are, and the like " add no meaning to an argument nor do derived words such as " Entity, Essence, Essentially, Essentiality ", which " are the names of nothing " but are mere " Signes " connecting " one name or attribute to another: as when we say, A man, is, a living body, wee mean not that the Man is one thing, the Living Body another, and the Is, or Being another: but that the Man, and the Living Body, is the same thing ;...." " Metaphysiques ," Hobbes says, is " far from the possibility of being understood " and is " repugnant to naturall Reason.

Entering the University of Leiden he took his degree in philosophy in 1689, with a dissertation De distinctione mentis a corpore ( on the difference of the mind from the body ), in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza.

William " Bill " Boyd Watterson II ( born July 5, 1958 ) is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995.

Watterson has kept away from the public eye and has given no indication of resuming the strip, creating new works based on the characters, or embarking on other projects, though he has published several anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes strips.

His syndicate, which has since become Universal Uclick, has said that the painting was the first new artwork from Watterson that the syndicate has seen since Calvin and Hobbes ended in 1995.

Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another.

Hobbes argues that all of human experience comes from biological processes contained within the body ( see: The Leviathan ).

* A History of Philosophy: Volume V: Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume.

In a more modern context, empiricists, like Hobbes and Locke, argued that knowledge ( and, for Locke, language ) emerge ultimately from abstracted sense impressions.

" Rejecting Cicero's view that men join in society primarily through " a certain social spirit which nature has implanted in man ," Hobbes declares that men join in society simply for the purpose of " getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent ... to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe.

" Parkin observes that much of Cumberland's material " is derived from Roman Stoicism, particularly from the work of Cicero, as " Cumberland deliberately cast his engagement with Hobbes in the mould of Cicero's debate between the Stoics, who believed that nature could provide an objective morality, and Epicureans, who argued that morality was human, conventional and self-interested.

This classification is comparatively recent ( it was not used by Aristotle or Hobbes, for instance ), and dates from the French Revolution era, when those members of the National Assembly who supported the republic, the common people and a secular society sat on the left and supporters of the monarchy, aristocratic privilege and the Church sat on the right.

He departed from Hobbes in that, based on the assumption of a society in which moral values are independent of governmental authority and widely shared, he argued for a government with power limited to the protection of personal property.

In his own words, Hobbes ' reflection began with the idea of " giving to every man his own ," a phrase he drew from the writings of Cicero.

This universalising step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare, is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists, from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence.

In theoretical terms, the idea of " sovereignty ", historically, from Socrates to Thomas Hobbes, has always necessitated a moral imperative on the entity exercising it.

Hobbes ' work was condemned by reformers for its defense of absolutism, and by traditionalists for its claim that the power of government derives from the power of its subjects rather than the will of God.

But it was part of the method of both alike to eliminate conventional sentiment and morality. In the seventeenth century, the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan advocated absolute monarchy, admired Thucydides and in 1628 was the first to translate his writings into English directly from Greek.

The starting point for most social contract theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any political order that Thomas Hobbes termed the “ state of nature ”.

Rousseau's political theory differs in important ways from that of Locke and Hobbes.