A plane goes down and forty strangers wash up on an island. No police, no courts, no government, nobody whose job it is to be in charge. Pretty soon someone says: we need some rules. And the second they say it, you are standing inside the oldest argument in politics.
What rules? Who enforces them? How much power do you hand over, and what happens when the person holding it goes bad? Three men wrote the three classic answers, and they could not have disagreed more. Thomas Hobbes (1651) says hand nearly all your power to one ruler and never take it back, because the alternative is everyone at war. John Locke (1689) says keep most of your rights, lend the government a few on strict terms, and fire it if it cheats. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) says give everything to the whole people at once and let them rule themselves in person.
Hobbes built the case for absolute power. Locke's argument shows up, almost word for word, in the American Declaration of Independence. Rousseau's became the book the French Revolution swore by.
Three books, three opening moods · the whole argument in miniature
- The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.Hobbes · 1651
- No one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.Locke · 1689
- Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.Rousseau · 1762
Here is the strange part. They are not really arguing about good and evil, or even much about what a government should do. They are arguing about one factual question, and everything else falls out of it on its own: what are people like when nobody is in charge? Answer a war, and you get Hobbes. Answer mostly fine, just no referee, and you get Locke. Answer free, until society ruined them, and you get Rousseau. The whole disagreement is one assumption deep.
Below, the three of them take the same five questions in turn, the ones you would actually have to settle on that island: what people are like alone, what you sign away, who ends up in charge, when you can throw them out, and what each deal quietly costs. For each question you get the plain version of all three answers, then the exact line from the book it came from, so you can check me against them. Their words are verbatim. Rousseau, the one who has to be translated, is quoted in the public-domain Cole translation, named where the wording matters.
Where the text comes from
All three books are old enough to be public domain, and I pulled every quote from a primary digital edition rather than retyping it from memory.
- Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), from the original text at Project Gutenberg, quoted in modern spelling and cited by part and chapter.
- Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), cited by Locke's own section numbers (the ยง), from the standard text mirrored at the Constitution Society.
- Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), in the public-domain English of G. D. H. Cole (1913), checked against the French original. Rousseau is the one of the three who has to be translated, so where a line is famous I have named Cole, because other translators word it differently. The opening is the standing example: Cole's Man is born free is Maurice Cranston's Man was born free, and the French will not settle which tense is right.
The breakdowns are mine. Where a thinker's popular image comes from a book other than the one quoted (Rousseau's gentle natural man really lives in his earlier Discourse on Inequality), I have tried to say so rather than smooth it over, and where a system has an ugly side (Hobbes on absolute power, Locke on property and slavery, Rousseau on being forced to be free), I have kept it in the frame instead of cropping it out.
The image on the homepage card is the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, engraved by Abraham Bosse in 1651: a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of the hundreds of tiny people who make him up. It is the first and still the best picture of the whole idea. British Library, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.