The Oldest Argument in Political Philosophy Just Got a Test Case
Hobbes and Locke have been arguing about this for 300 years. El Salvador just made it real.
Why This Topic
El Salvador’s transformation under Nayib Bukele is one of the most dramatic and contested political stories of the past decade. In 2015, El Salvador had a homicide rate of sixty-two per hundred thousand, making it one of the most dangerous countries on earth. By 2023, after Bukele’s state of exception and mass detention campaign, that number had fallen by over ninety percent. Bukele’s approval ratings hover near eighty percent. The gangs, principally MS-13 and Barrio 18, which had controlled entire neighborhoods and extracted tribute from businesses and ordinary citizens at gunpoint, have been functionally dismantled.
The controversy is real and so is the achievement. Over seventy thousand people were arrested under emergency powers that the constitution was not designed to sustain indefinitely. Constitutional rights were suspended by executive decree. Credible human rights organizations have documented cases of innocent people imprisoned, and conditions inside Bukele’s mega-prison are by any honest account severe. He has moved to consolidate power across institutions, rewriting the constitution to permit his own re-election and replacing the Supreme Court with loyalist appointees. The structural checks that might have constrained a future, less popular leader have been systematically weakened.
This is not a simple story, and it deserves philosophical thinkers capable of arguing both sides at their strongest. The underlying question is one of the oldest in political philosophy: when does the imperative to maintain order justify the suspension of the protections that make order worth having? And who gets to do the arithmetic when innocent people end up on the wrong side of the calculation?
Why Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes is the natural defender of Bukele’s approach because Leviathan is essentially the philosophical manual for exactly this kind of sovereign action. Published in 1651 in the aftermath of the English Civil War, Leviathan argues that human beings in the state of nature, absent a powerful sovereign authority, will inevitably fall into conflict that makes life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The solution is a social contract in which citizens surrender natural liberty to a sovereign in exchange for physical security. The sovereign’s primary obligation is to maintain order. Everything else, including procedural rights, follows from that foundation.
What makes Hobbes particularly right for this debate is that he is not making a purely normative argument about what sovereigns should be allowed to do. He is making a descriptive argument about what human beings actually need and what governments actually require to function. His defense of strong sovereign authority is grounded in a deeply pessimistic but arguably realistic view of human nature, and El Salvador under gang control maps onto the conditions Hobbes was theorizing about with uncomfortable precision. In Leviathan he describes the state of nature as a condition where there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and that description captures exactly what gang extortion does to a local economy.
Hobbes also wrote from experience rather than abstraction. He watched the English Civil War produce exactly the conditions he described, and he was not interested in philosophical elegance that collapsed on contact with actual political violence. That gives his position in this debate a certain earned quality. He is not recommending something he has not thought through to its darkest conclusion.
Why John Locke
Locke is the natural counter because his Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, is in substantial part a direct philosophical response to the tradition Hobbes represents. Where Hobbes says sovereign authority must be strong because the alternative is worse, Locke says government derives legitimacy from consent and exists specifically to protect natural rights. When it fails to protect those rights, or actively violates them, it forfeits its claim to authority.
The Two Treatises were written in the context of the Glorious Revolution, and Locke’s concern was precisely the kind of executive overreach that Bukele represents. Habeas corpus, separation of powers, legislative consent for extraordinary measures: these are not optional procedures in Locke’s framework. They are the substance of legitimate government. Without them, the government is not a social contract. It is simply a more organized form of the violence it replaced. Locke writes in the Second Treatise that a ruler who makes himself master over the lives and liberties of subjects has put himself into a state of war with them, which maps directly onto the Bukele situation.
There is also genuine intellectual antagonism between these two traditions. Locke was deeply aware of Hobbes and rejected his conclusions explicitly. The Two Treatises can be read as a sustained argument against the idea that sovereign authority can or should operate without structural constraints. The fact that their disagreement has been playing out in one form or another for over three hundred years suggests neither man found a position the other could comfortably accept. That tension is exactly what we wanted on screen.
Who Else We Considered
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a genuine contender for Locke’s position. His social contract theory is, if anything, more radical than Locke’s in its insistence that legitimate government requires the general will of the people, and his critique of concentrated power is sharp and emotional in ways that would have made for a different kind of debate. We held him back because his concept of the general will is slippery enough that a clever defender of Bukele could argue that eighty percent approval ratings represent exactly that general will in action. Locke’s framework is more cleanly incompatible with what Bukele actually did, which makes for a sharper argument. Rousseau remains a strong candidate for a future episode.
Niccolo Machiavelli was seriously considered for Hobbes’s position and would have made a different and arguably more theatrical case. Machiavelli’s defense of Bukele would not be grounded in social contract theory at all. It would be purely pragmatic: it worked, the prince must use fear when necessary, results are the only legitimate measure of political action. We held him back from this particular debate because we wanted to keep the framework inside the social contract tradition, where the disagreement between the two positions is sharpest. We may return to Machiavelli on this topic in a separate episode with a different opponent.
Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century German jurist and theorist of emergency powers, would have been the most technically precise defender of Bukele’s constitutional maneuver. His concept of the state of exception maps almost exactly onto what Bukele did, and his argument that the sovereign is defined by the decision on the exception would have sharpened Hobbes’s position considerably. We held him back because his association with National Socialism makes it difficult to discuss his ideas without the conversation becoming about that history rather than El Salvador. His framework is genuinely useful for understanding Bukele. The baggage that comes with invoking him is not worth it here.
Edmund Burke was briefly considered as an alternative who occupies a position between Hobbes and Locke. Burke might have partially defended Bukele on order-and-stability grounds while remaining genuinely uncomfortable with the methods, which would have produced a more ambivalent debate. We decided the sharper opposition between Hobbes and Locke produces more useful philosophical clarity, and we can save Burke’s ambivalence for a topic where ambivalence is the interesting thing rather than a complication.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Hobbes’s defense of Bukele follows directly from Leviathan’s core architecture. The social contract is not an agreement to preserve procedural rights. It is an agreement to surrender certain freedoms in exchange for physical security, and if the state is not providing physical security, it has already broken the contract on its end. El Salvador’s pre-Bukele governments had broken that contract comprehensively. The gangs controlled territory the state did not. Citizens paid tribute to private armed groups because the alternative was death. In Hobbesian terms, the state of nature had returned in practice if not in name, and the social contract had already collapsed before Bukele arrived.
This means Hobbes does not see the crackdown as a suspension of constitutional rights. He sees it as the restoration of the precondition for constitutional rights to mean anything. A constitution that operates inside a country where gangs control large portions of the territory is not a functioning constitution. It is a document. Restoring sovereign authority over that territory is not a violation of the social contract. It is the enforcement of it.
Hobbes also makes a point that Part 2 develops explicitly: due process is a feature of functioning civil society, not a feature of the state of nature. In a working state with functioning courts, procedural rights are genuine goods worth protecting. In a state where the homicide rate is sixty-two per hundred thousand, insisting on procedural protections for the people producing that rate is, in Hobbes’s view, a luxury the people dying cannot afford. His critics find this cold. He would say that is because the alternative is colder.
Locke’s opposition rests on a fundamentally different premise about what government is. For Hobbes, government is essentially a security service. For Locke, government is a trust. The people delegate authority to a government on specific conditions, principally that the government uses that authority to protect natural rights rather than to violate them. When it violates those rights, even in the name of protecting other rights, it has broken the trust.
The innocent people detained under Bukele’s emergency powers are not, for Locke, a rounding error in a successful security operation. They are the evidence that the trust has been broken. Locke’s most important point, the one that drives Part 2 of the debate, is one that Hobbes’s framework genuinely cannot answer: the emergency powers template does not expire with Bukele. The constitutional environment he leaves behind, a compliant legislature, a constrained judiciary, a population conditioned to accept mass detention as normal governance, is available to every future executive in El Salvador. Locke’s concern is not Bukele specifically. It is the institutional trap Bukele leaves behind.
The corruption argument in Part 2 is also historically authentic to Locke’s position. Locke distinguishes carefully in the Second Treatise between institutions that have failed and institutions that have been corrupted. The prescription is different. Failed institutions need redesign. Corrupted institutions need cleansing and reconstruction. Bukele did neither. He dismantled and replaced with himself, which is the pattern Locke identifies as the prelude to tyranny regardless of how popular the replacement is at the time of installation.
A Note on the Sources
The debate draws primarily on Leviathan (1651) for Hobbes and the Two Treatises of Government (1689) for Locke. Both are in the public domain and are worth reading directly. Leviathan in particular is more readable than its reputation suggests. Hobbes writes with a clarity and even a dark pleasure that is not always what people expect from seventeenth century political philosophy.
Hobbes’s voice in Leviathan is remarkably direct. He is not hedging and he is not softening his conclusions for an audience that might find them uncomfortable. His chapter on the natural condition of mankind is one of the most bracing pieces of political writing in the English language, and the argument builds from that foundation with real logical rigor. We tried to capture some of that directness in his debate character, including the quality of a man who genuinely enjoys being right about things most people find too dark to say plainly. The Christopher Hitchens comparison used in production to set his character note is not arbitrary. Both men shared a quality of treating the discomfort of their audience as evidence that the point was landing rather than evidence that they had gone too far.
Locke’s voice is more procedural but no less emphatic when he reaches his conclusions. His insistence in the Second Treatise that a government which violates natural rights has put itself into a state of war with its subjects is not a gentle suggestion. It is a justification for resistance, and it was understood as such in its original context. The Two Treatises were written to justify a revolution. Locke was not a cautious man, whatever the measured quality of his prose might suggest.
The historical record is clear on the core positions of both thinkers. Where the debate requires some extrapolation is in applying seventeenth century frameworks to a twenty-first century case. Neither Hobbes nor Locke had a concept of modern constitutional democracy, social media approval ratings, or a government that could imprison seventy thousand people in a facility designed for that purpose. The extrapolation is honest and the philosophical positions are real, but it is worth acknowledging that both men would have found the specifics of El Salvador in 2022 somewhat disorienting, even as the underlying dynamics would have been entirely familiar.
What Comes Next
We have several debates in development, including a return to the emergency powers question with a different historical pairing and at least one economic debate that will produce some genuinely uncomfortable moments for everyone watching. Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com to get new episodes and companion posts as they publish.
Part 1 of the debate is available now on the PhilosophersTalk YouTube channel. Part 2 follows immediately. Watch both, argue about them, and tell us in the comments which side you think made the stronger case on the successor problem. We read them and the comments on that specific question have been genuinely interesting so far.
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