Study Questions for Hobbes and Rousseau

For Hobbes’s Leviathan, chapters 6 (partial) and 13 (complete):

1. What are the two kinds of human motivation? (Ch. 6)

2. What is the goal of "endeavors"? (Ch. 6)

3. How are human desires related to good and evil? to pleasure and pain? How is good and evil related to pleasure and pain? (Ch. 6)

4. On what grounds does Hobbes argue that all men are by nature equal? (Ch. 13)

5. What does "by nature" mean here? (Ch. 13)

6. What three human qualities or behaviors follow from men's equality? (Ch. 13)

7. What is the natural condition of human existence? Does Hobbes say that this is a good condition? a bad condition? a desirable condition? undesirable condition? necessary or unavoidable condition? (Ch. 13)

8. Does this natural condition really exist? Where? (Ch. 13)

9. What is Hobbes's moral judgment about man's natural condition? (Ch. 13)

For the paragraphs from Rousseau’s Discourse:

Part One.

1. What moral standards are applicable to primitive man living in a state of nature?

2. Compare Rousseau's view of man to Hobbes's (Leviathan, Ch. 13).

3. What is the nature of human love?

4. Does inequality exist in the state of nature? In other words, is inequality "natural"? Explain Rousseau's view at the end of the First Part.

5. What is Rousseau's view of man in the state of nature? Do men always live in an isolated, non-social condition in the state of nature?

Part Two.

1. What forced man out of his simple animal existence?