How did John Locke and Thomas Hobbes influence the aspects of government today?
Although many people pay lip service to John Locke (especially here in the United States, as this nation was founded on Thomas Jefferson’s restatement of Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Government), the modern state is not the limited state of John Locke, but rather the unlimited state of Thomas Hobbes. The only problem with Locke’s political philosophy is that limited government is utopian and that the only form of libertarianism that can actually work in the real world is free-market anarchism. Most modern day political philosophers are in the Hobbesian tradition, although some may pay lip service to Locke. At the very core of the justification for the modern state is the myth of the social contract (obviously, no government has ever come into existence in that fashion, as all governments were born of conquest in war; this is true of Canada, which was conquered by Britain from France and the Native Americans, of the United States, which was conquered from the Native Americans and the Mexican
