John Locke is one of the founders of "liberal" political philosophy, the philosophy of individual rights and limited government. This is the philosophy on which the American Constitution and all western political systems today are based. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke's most important political work, he uses natural law to ground his philosophy. But there are many different interpretations of the natural law, from the Ciceronian to the Thomistic to the Grotian. What is Locke's interpretation? What version of natural law supports liberal politics? Some argue that this is a misguided question. They say that Locke's political philosophy is not based on natural law at all, but instead on natural rights, like the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This is probably the greatest controversy in Locke interpretation today. Natural law theories hold that human beings are subject to a moral law. Morality is fundamentally about duty, the duty each individual has to abide by the natural law. .
Thomas Hobbes created a new approach when he based morality not on duty but on right, each individual's right to preserve himself, to pursue his own good-essentially, to do as he wishes. Is Locke a follower of Hobbes, basing his theory on right rather than natural law? What difference does it make? One characteristic of a rights theory is that it takes man to be by nature a solitary and independent creature, as in Hobbes's "state of nature." In Hobbes's state of nature, men are free and independent, having a right to pursue their own self-interest, and no duties to one another. The moral logic is something like this: nature has made individuals independent; nature has left each individual to fend for himself; nature must therefore have granted each person a right to fend for himself. This right is the fundamental moral fact, rather than any duty individuals have to a law or to each other.