John Locke: Last time you asked me who judges whether the executive has broken his trust, and I intend to answer you fully today.
Thomas Hobbes: I have been waiting with the patience of a man who already knows the answer will not survive contact with reality.
John Locke: The people judge, and when every earthly court and every earthly representative has been captured or silenced, they retain what I have called an appeal to heaven, the right to resist by force what force alone has imposed on them.
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Thomas Hobbes: An appeal to heaven is simply a prettier phrase for civil war, John, dressed in a clergyman’s collar so it sounds less like the thing it actually is.
John Locke: Call it what you like, it is the only honest answer available once a government turns its soldiers against the very people who granted it authority in the first place.
Thomas Hobbes: And there is the entire disease laid bare within a single sentence. You have just told an armed populace that they alone get to decide when their government has crossed a line only they can see.
John Locke: I have told them no such extraordinary thing. I have told them that legitimate power ends precisely where consent ends, and that a soldier on a street he was never invited onto is standing exactly on that boundary.
Thomas Hobbes: Consider the case again, precisely as it happened. Soldiers were sent to guard federal buildings and federal officers, not to conquer a city, not to seize its treasury, merely to stand watch while courts sorted out the argument between the mayor and the president.
John Locke: Merely to stand watch, you say, as though soldiers patrolling residential blocks in a city that explicitly rejected them is a small and forgettable detail rather than the entire question this debate exists to settle.
Thomas Hobbes: It is a detail precisely because the alternative you propose has no stopping point whatsoever. Today the trigger is soldiers in Chicago, tomorrow it is a tax collector, next week it is a census taker, and eventually your appeal to heaven has been invoked so many times that heaven stops answering and the war simply continues on its own.
John Locke: The stopping point is the same one it has always been, that force without right returns any relationship between ruler and ruled to a state of war, and a state of war has clear boundaries, it ends the instant right and force are realigned.
Thomas Hobbes: Let me steelman your entire position before I finish dismantling it, if only so no honest viewer can accuse me of having faced a weaker version of you.
John Locke: I welcome the attempt, though I suspect you will find honesty more difficult than cruelty.
Thomas Hobbes: Your claim is this. Government is a trust, not a possession, and a trust can be broken. When an executive employs the sword against the very people whose consent gave him the sword to begin with, he has stepped outside the boundary of legitimate authority entirely, and the people retain, as their final and most sacred right, the ability to judge that betrayal for themselves and resist it, exactly as they would resist any foreign army marching down their street uninvited.
John Locke: That is precisely my position, stated with more honesty than I expected from you, which I intend to treat as an accident rather than a habit.
Thomas Hobbes: An accident it shall remain, because now I bury it. A right of private judgment retained by every citizen is not a safeguard against tyranny, it is a guarantee of permanent civil war, since every faction believes with total sincerity that it alone sees the betrayal clearly.
John Locke: Now let me return the same courtesy, and state your position as fairly as I am able, before I do to it what you have just tried and failed to do to mine.
Thomas Hobbes: Proceed, though I doubt fairness is a muscle you exercise often.
John Locke: Your claim is that sovereignty which can be judged by its own subjects is not sovereignty at all, that peace requires one final, undivided, unappealable authority over the use of force, and that the moment subjects are permitted to decide for themselves when obedience ends, you have recreated the exact condition that let neighbor slaughter neighbor in the England you personally survived, which means every governor, every mayor, and every citizen must ultimately submit their judgment to that one authority or the whole structure collapses back into the state of nature you spent your life trying to escape.
Thomas Hobbes: That is correct, and rather better argued than I have heard it argued by men who actually agree with me, which is genuinely irritating.
John Locke: I only stated it so precisely so that when I finish burying it, no one can claim I strangled an infant instead of a grown argument, since apparently we are both fond of that particular image.
Thomas Hobbes: Then finish it, if you believe yourself capable of such a thing.
John Locke: An authority immune to judgment by the very people it claims to protect is not peace, Thomas, it is simply violence that has stopped introducing itself. You call the state of nature the disease. I call your unaccountable sovereign the same disease wearing a crown instead of no crown at all.
Thomas Hobbes: A crown that answers to no one at least answers consistently. Your alternative hands every disagreement in the republic back to whichever side can raise the larger militia, which is not liberty, it is simply war conducted more slowly and with better lawyers.
John Locke: I wrote my treatise in part to answer men very like you, Thomas, men who insisted the people owed absolute obedience to whoever happened to sit above them, and history did not vindicate that argument, it replaced the king who believed it with one who accepted limits.
Thomas Hobbes: History replaced one king with another king, John, it did not replace the sword with a pamphlet, and every one of your celebrated limits still rests on soldiers somewhere being willing to enforce them.
John Locke: Soldiers willing to enforce limits agreed upon by the people are an entirely different creature from soldiers sent to overrule the people, and pretending those two things are identical is the oldest trick absolutism has ever played on frightened men.
Thomas Hobbes: I am not frightened, John, I am simply the only one of us willing to say plainly what happens the day nobody is left holding the sword at all.
John Locke: Nobody is proposing that nobody holds it, Thomas, only that the hand holding it remains answerable to the very people it was raised to protect, which is a distinction you keep pretending not to hear.
John Locke: I would rather live inside a war conducted slowly, with lawyers, courts, and elections standing between me and the sword, than live one single day inside your peace, which is simply obedience with the funeral already paid for in advance.
Thomas Hobbes: YOUR LAWYERS DID NOT STOP A GUARDSMAN FROM DYING, JOHN, YOUR COURTS SIMPLY ARRIVED AFTER THE BODY WAS ALREADY COLD!
John Locke: YOUR SOVEREIGN DID NOT STOP HIM EITHER, HE IS THE REASON THE MAN WAS STANDING THERE AT ALL!
Thomas Hobbes: HE WAS STANDING THERE BECAUSE ORDER REQUIRES SOMEONE WILLING TO STAND!
John Locke: HE WAS STANDING THERE BECAUSE YOUR PHILOSOPHY NEVER ASKS WHETHER HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SENT AT ALL!
Thomas Hobbes: SOMEONE MUST DECIDE, JOHN, AND THAT SOMEONE CANNOT BE EVERYONE AT ONCE!
John Locke: THEN LET IT BE THE PEOPLE, ALL OF THEM, RATHER THAN ONE MAN WHO ANSWERS TO NONE OF THEM!
Thomas Hobbes: SPOKEN LIKE A MAN WHO HAS NEVER ONCE HAD TO GOVERN ANYTHING LARGER THAN A GARDEN!
John Locke: SPOKEN LIKE A MAN WHO NEVER MET A TYRANT HE DIDN’T EVENTUALLY DEFEND!
Thomas Hobbes: ENOUGH OF THIS!
John Locke: GLADLY!
Thomas Hobbes: Well. I believe we have finally reached the bottom of four hundred years of disagreement, and it appears to be exactly as unpleasant as I expected.
John Locke: If anyone watching believes a government should answer to the people it commands rather than the reverse, like this video before you do anything else.
Thomas Hobbes: If anyone watching has any sense at all, they will subscribe instead for the day I finally get the last word against a man who thinks committees can stop a bullet.
John Locke: You will never get the last word, Thomas, because tyrants never do, history simply waits them out and then writes the ending without their permission.
Thomas Hobbes: History remembers me quite well, John, considerably better than it remembers men who wrote lovely essays about consent while safely out of reach of anyone who might test them.
John Locke: Subscribe anyway, if only to watch a man discover four centuries too late that the sword he trusted so completely was never actually his to control.
Thomas Hobbes: Subscribe instead to watch a man learn that lawyers and elections make wonderful reading and absolutely nothing else once the shooting has already started.
John Locke: We shall let the viewers decide which one of us history ultimately proves correct, though I suspect they already have.
Thomas Hobbes: They have not, and I intend to keep telling them so for another four hundred years if necessary.
