Critiques of Hobbes and Locke

Critiques of Hobbes state that a sovereign will limit people’s rights and is likely to become a tyrant. Absolute dictators will be corrupted and strong men in the commonwealth will do anything to overthrow them. I agree with these critiques of Hobbes because the King having all the power can take away all of our natural rights and lead to corruption. An example of a corrupted sovereign was when King Louis XVI heavily taxed all the peasants. French during this time was funding the American Revolution and was broke. This means that the peasants were angry because there was no money for food, basic necessities, and taxes were high. Despite all of this the nobles were living lavishly, so much so that a rumor surfaced that Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI’s wife, said “let them eat cake”(talking to the peasants)  made the public even more mad. When King Louis XVI took minimal actions to fix this problem he was overthrown during the french revolution. As shown in the french revolution, a sovereign that is incompetent will be overthrown.

Critiques of Locke are directed to America, as America used Locke's idea to found the country in the constitution, where it writes “We the people have inalienable rights in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However some critiques of America’s recreation of Locke’s ideas are the long and expensive election process, where it's often hard to reach a consensus due to the fact that people are not informed about the leaders. I agree with these critiques because electorates should know who they are voting for and politicians should be more open about their plans. If you go around asking citizens if they know the future plans of our president Trump, there’s a high chance of them not knowing his plans. This shows that the people are not informed leading to a long and expensive election processes.