thinking has gained modern currency, largely because it provides a readily comprehensible and convenient framework for formulating and discussing the perplexing questions perennially associated with the proper scope, functions, and authority of government. The contract approach also highlights why the answers to these questions vary so widely.
             The disagreements that emerge among social-contract thinkers over the proper role and ends of government stem mainly from their different assumptions regarding conditions in the state of nature. These assumptions, in turn, reflect even more basic differences over the inherent nature of humankind. The philosophies of Locke and Hobbes present an interesting contrast concerning the state of nature and the governmental contract. Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651), postulated that the state of nature was marked by a "war of all against all" in which the life of an individual was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thus, through the establishment of government, individuals sought self-pres
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