What are the differences between Thomas Hobbes' and John Locke's concerns with the conditions of the state of nature?

On the whole, John Locke had a far more optimistic view of nature than Thomas Hobbes. Locke believed that every child comes into the world with a blank slate, or tabula rasa. In other words, we come into the world without any pre-existing mental content, and our knowledge and personalities form based on our experiences. This assumption became the basis for John Locke’s theory of knowledge, in which he theorizes, in the tradition of Aristotle, that knowledge comes as a result of interaction and experience with the outside world, as opposed to introspection.

In contrast, Thomas Hobbes believed that humans come into the world with an inborn animalistic nature that predisposes us towards selfishness. According to Hobbes, the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” It is only through establishing a social order that humans can overcome this rather miserable state of affairs. By abdicating some of their power to social authority, humans gain freedom through protection to live their lives without the self-interested interference of others. This arrangement is often called a social contract.

What are the differences between John Locke's and Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy?

Both John Locke and Thomas Hobbes have been described as social contract theorists. This means that they conceive of government as being formed by an agreement between the people of a given territory to fulfill certain mutually beneficial and desirable ends. Normally, social contract theory seeks to place limits on the role of governments, and Locke is very much a part of that philosophical tradition. For Locke, governments are formed among men for the sole purpose of certain rights, most notably the right to private property.

Once established, however, governments are effectively on borrowed time, and only exist at the sufferance of those they govern. If governments are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens’ natural rights, then citizens are perfectly entitled to overthrow their rulers and replace them with a government that will actually do what governments, in Locke’s eyes, are suppose to do.

Hobbes, on the other hand, argues that governments have theoretically unlimited power. Only in this way will they be able to carry out the function for which they were originally established, namely to protect people’s lives and property. In the so-called state of nature, the condition of society that existed prior to the establishment of government, people were, according to Hobbes, at each other’s throats. The law of the jungle prevailed, and everyone lived in a state of perpetual chaos and bloodshed.

But as all men were rational and of more or less equal strength, no one individual or group of individuals was able to prevail. This meant that the only way to bring order and stability to society was by people coming together to establish a government in which the sovereign—who would remain in the state of nature—would have the absolute right to rule, untrammeled by any constraints.

Hobbes believed that this was the only way that society could be prevented from falling back into the state of nature, with all the chaos and disorder that that would entail. Unlike Locke, he didn’t believe that citizens had the right to overthrow a sovereign; to him, that was an open invitation to anarchy.

In a nutshell, Hobbes believed that a stable tyranny was preferable to an unstable system of limited government which could be overthrown by the people at any time. Locke believed the exact opposite.