Why Do We Obey? Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and the Social Contract That Rules Your Life

Thematic Conflict: Absolute Sovereignty vs. Inalienable Rights

March 2020. The Indian government announced a nationwide lockdown with four hours’ notice.
Shops shut. Trains stopped. Police enforced a curfew that nobody voted on. And most people,
hundreds of millions of them simply stayed inside.

Why?

Think about that for a second. You are, theoretically, a free adult. The state told you to
lock yourself in your home, and you did it. You didn’t demand a referendum first. You didn’t
negotiate. You complied and if you didn’t, a police officer could legally drag you off the street.

This isn’t a Covid-specific problem. It happens every day, in smaller ways. You pay taxes you
didn’t personally approve. You stop at a red light even when no one is watching. You submit your
Aadhaar details to access welfare you’re entitled to. The state has enormous power over your life,
and a rational, autonomous person mostly accept it.

This is the oldest and most important question in political philosophy. Not “who should rule?”
or “what policies should we have?” but the more fundamental one underneath all of that:
what gives any government the right to tell us what to do at all?

Two men, writing in seventeenth-century England, gave answers so different that they still define
the fault lines in every debate about state power, fundamental rights, and civil liberties.
Their names were Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

Part A Thomas Hobbes: The Case for the Leviathan

Who Was He, and Why Did He Think This Way?

Hobbes (1588 – 1679) watched England tear itself apart. The English Civil War (1642 – 1651)
a conflict between Parliament and King Charles I that ended in regicide and years of chaos,
destroyed his faith in any romantic view of human nature. He fled to Paris. He saw what happens
when political authority collapses.

When he wrote Leviathan in 1651, he wasn’t theorizing in the abstract. He was trying
to answer a concrete, terrifying question:
what stops civilized society from eating itself alive?

The Mechanical Human

Here’s how Hobbes sees you. You are not a special, soul-bearing creature made in God’s image.
You are a body in motion -driven by desires (things you want) and aversions (things you fear).
The strongest aversion of all is the fear of violent death. Rationality, for
Hobbes, is not wisdom. It is calculation: “What keeps me alive and comfortable?”

Imagine a World Without Government

Hobbes asks you to strip away every law, every institution, every police force, every court.
No government. Just humans.

Your neighbour could take your food. You’d want to take his first, just in case. He knows that,
so he’s already planning to take yours before you can. Because you’re roughly equal in
vulnerability, even a physically weaker person can kill a stronger one with a weapon, no one is safe.
Hobbes calls this the State of Nature, and identifies three engines that keep it violent:

• Competition: everyone wants the same scarce resources.
• Diffidence: everyone is scared of what everyone else might do,
  so they strike first.
• Glory: everyone wants to be respected and feared, so insults invite violence.

Important: Hobbes is not saying everyone is constantly stabbing each other. He means something more precise.
If there is no reliable authority to enforce agreements, the possibility of violence is always
present and that possibility alone is enough to prevent trust, cooperation, or any stable society.

The Contract: Trading Liberty for Safety

Rational people will eventually realize this is unsustainable. The solution: everyone agrees
simultaneously to surrender their individual right to govern themselves to a central power.
You give up your right to harm me; I give up my right to harm you; we both give those rights
to the Sovereign, who enforces the peace on everyone.

This is the Social Contract. And it creates the Leviathan.
The Hobbesian Sovereign has three key properties:

• Absolute and Indivisible: power cannot be split between parliament and king,
  or between church and state. Divided authority is a slow-motion civil war.
• Irrevocable: you can’t dissolve the government when you disagree with it.
  Tear up the contract and you return to the State of Nature.
• One Narrow Exception: if the sovereign directly tries to kill or destroy you,
  you may resist. The entire reason you entered the contract was self-preservation.

Case Study 1 Preventive Detention vs. Due Process

India’s preventive detention laws the UAPA, NSA, PSA allow the state to detain individuals
before they commit any crime, on the basis of anticipated threat.

The Hobbesian logic: The state must be able to preempt threats to public order.
Waiting for harm to occur before acting is precisely the luxury you cannot afford if your job is
to prevent the State of Nature from reasserting itself. Order must come first.

The Lockean counterargument: Detention without trial is the clearest example of
the state acting without established law, without an impartial judge, and without due process
the exact three inconveniences that political society was created to solve.

In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), the Supreme Court held that
“procedure established by law” under Article 21 must be fair, just, and reasonable not arbitrary.
The Court created a Lockean firewall inside the Indian Constitution against executive overreach.

Case Study 2 Digital Surveillance and Privacy

The Hobbesian case: Mass data collection, biometric databases, facial recognition
modern Leviathan capabilities justified under the state’s duty to prevent crime, fraud, and external threats.

The Lockean check: In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017),
a nine-judge Constitution Bench ruled unanimously that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21
one that pre-dates the Constitution itself. The Court established the
Three-Fold Proportionality Test:

• Legality: is there a valid law authorizing the action?
• Legitimate State Aim: does the action serve a rational public purpose?
• Proportionality: is this the least intrusive measure that achieves the aim?

Case Study 3 Emergency Powers and Constitutional Democracy

Every democracy has emergency provisions. India’s Articles 352, 356, and 360 grant the executive
sweeping powers during national, state, and financial emergencies respectively.

Hobbes explains why such provisions exist:
Moments of existential threat require undivided, rapid authority. The survival of the political
community cannot wait for ordinary procedural constraints.

Locke asks six harder questions about every emergency power invoked:

• Who authorized the restriction?
• Under what law?
• For what purpose?
• For how long?
• What institutional safeguards remain?
• What prevents exceptional power from becoming permanent?

The Emergency of 1975 – 77 is the defining Indian case study where Hobbesian emergency logic
became precisely the Lockean nightmare where the exception swallowed the rule, and the fiduciary
trust was comprehensively breached.

Trigger Keywords When to Deploy Hobbes and Locke

Counter-Thinkers Required for Balanced Answers

• Against Hobbes: Use Locke (rights, limited government),
  Rousseau (political freedom), or Arendt (danger of unconstrained bureaucratic
  authority Episode 04).
• Against Locke: Use Hobbes (the state needs coercive capacity to function),
  or communitarians like Sandel (rights don’t pre-exist community).

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