This chapter examines the two main political ideologies that were spawned by the civil war and its aftermath in mid-17th-century England: the absolutism of Hobbes; and the liberalism of Locke. The central issues that divided them were the nature of government, the issue of private property, the nature of law, civil rights, social policy issues and religious tolerance (Peters, 1956, pp 33–5). The chapter will concentrate on the social policy issues far more than other discussions on these two thinkers.

The main preoccupation of Hobbes and Locke was to devise a secular political theory that safeguarded individual security either side by side with individual liberty, as in Locke's work, or at the expense of individual liberty, as in the case of Hobbes.

The political upheavals and debates of this period took place at a time of rising economic growth, widening income inequality and increasing relative poverty – an economic climate that was hardly conducive to social stability. In England and Wales, the national income doubled between the 1560s and the 1640s while ‘the distribution of that income was markedly and increasingly uneven. This was an expanding economy, but one with a growing problem of structural poverty’ (Wrightson, 2000, p 198).

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

Just as Plato's utopia was a reaction to the constant political upheavals in Athens, Hobbes’ theory of the absolute monarch was a reflection of what he saw as the ravages and anarchy caused by the civil war in England – it was, as he put it, ‘occasioned by the disorders of the present time’, which he attributed to the mistaken ideas that stressed individual judgement, private conscience, equality, rights and limited sovereign power. Such ideas encouraged people to question the existing social order and gradually lead to anarchical behaviour. He had in mind the radical egalitarian ideas of the Levellers and the Diggers, who openly challenged the existing political and economic system in favour of a democratic welfare-minded form of government where the legal rights of every citizen were protected.

Hobbes’ theories aimed at providing a cure for political unrest and revolution not only in England but everywhere; and at creating a stable, orderly society ruled with the iron fist of a hereditary monarch.