Episode Details

Every government claims the right to do what no private person may — to tax, to jail, to send men to die. By what right? For most of history the answer was God’s will or the king’s sword. Then a handful of thinkers gave a different and dangerous answer: consent. This episode takes down the most consequential political idea of the modern age — the social contract — in the words of the men who built it.

Hobbes runs the experiment first and recoils: the state of nature is a war of all against all, and the only escape is to surrender everything to an absolute sovereign, a mortal god who can never be resisted. Then Locke runs the very same experiment and reaches the opposite pole — a state of nature already governed by natural law, men already holding their rights to life, liberty, and property, government built by consent to protect them, and a people absolved of obedience the moment that government turns predator. It is the right of revolution, and it became, almost word for word, the argument of the Declaration of Independence. The philosophy of the founding, fully assembled — with one older inheritance still to come.