Question

The framers drew on the ideas of the british political philosophers _______________ in perceiving the relationship between government and the governed as a social contract

Answer 1

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke

Most especially the American founding fathers looked to the ideas of John Locke. Thomas Hobbes had pointed to the social contract as the source of a government's authority, but his argument in Leviathan (1651) still supported a strong monarch style of government for the sake of a country's security and stability. Locke's arguments in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689) were more focused on the authority of majority voting in a society and republican government through legislatures.