Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Contract, Trust, And Resistance In The `Second Treatise', Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

If there is a single problem that has dominated political thought for the past four hundred years, it is the tension within the body politic between the will of the collective, as it is expressed by those vested with authority and power, and the will of the individual. Among political theorists who have examined this problem, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke viewed this potentially ruinous tension in radically different ways. In his Leviathan, Hobbes presents the problem of how we are to conduct ourselves as a society, an apparent dilemma whose horns are anarchy and servile absolutism. Either we …