The Ideas of Government Held by Locke and Hobbes The ideas that Hobbes and Locke set forth in their essays are opposite each other. Hobbes retains the notion that if there is not a power to keep people in their place, they will continually be in war against each other. His Leviathan presents a bleak picture of human beings in the state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Locke on the other hand, presented humans in a more rational, tolerant, and cooperative state but agreed with Hobbes upon the origin of the “social contract” (an implicit agreement between everyone in a society to respect legal authority, so as to enable the pursuit of happiness