ABSTRACT
Political modernity arguably began with the articulation of the political principles of freedom and equality in the seventeenth century. Thomas Hobbes was the first to base a political theory on human freedom and equality, which to him were empirical propositions that roughly characterized the condition of people in a hypothetical state of nature. From these propositions Hobbes inferred that life without political society would be a brutal war of all against all, and this inference led him to the conclusion – which he viewed as logically inescapable – that people would agree jointly to authorize an absolute sovereign to provide them with protection in exchange for obedience. Some of Hobbes’s royalist associates were anxious about basing authority in consent, and with good reason: a generation later John Locke reformulated natural freedom and equality into a revolutionary creed that justified resistance to tyrants and upended the established social and political order. These principles have defined the modern political idiom ever since.
