This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ask what makes a government's authority legitimate, and three of the tradition's founding figures give three different answers, each starting from the same basic move, imagining people before government exists, in a state of nature, and asking what would drive them to accept one. Hobbes' state of nature is a war of every man against every man, life famously nasty, brutish and short, because with no common power to keep everyone in awe, each person's own reasonable fear of everyone else makes peace impossible without one. His remedy is severe: people surrender their natural right to govern themselves almost entirely to a single sovereign, and once surrendered it is not easily taken back, because a sovereign that could be overthrown whenever subjects grew dissatisfied would not deliver the security the whole arrangement exists to buy. Locke's state of nature is milder, governed already by a law of reason that forbids harming others in their life, health, liberty or possessions, so government is not rescue from chaos but a convenience, appointed to judge disputes impartially and to protect property more reliably than each person judging their own case. Because government exists by the people's consent for their benefit, it can forfeit that consent by breaking the trust, which is exactly the room Hobbes' sovereign was built to deny. Rousseau denies that either picture captures what legitimacy actually requires. Consent to a ruler is not enough if the ruler's will is not authentically the people's own; genuine legitimacy requires submission to the general will, the collective, common interest a properly constituted people share, which can differ from what any momentary majority happens to want. Three thinkers, one shared question, and three answers that still organize practically every argument since about what a government owes the people who accept it.