ABSTRACT
Political equality is important, to be sure, and it is at the root of the American democratic experience. Like most social movements, political equality had a number of intellectual ancestors, key thinkers and writers who both captured and catalyzed new understandings of justice. In England, two individuals were particularly important: Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Earlier in his career, Hobbes had translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, a book that describes the breakdown of social norms and moral order in parts of ancient Greece where established governments had fallen and no formal civil authority existed. Locke's state of nature differs from Hobbes' in important ways. Locke saw the state of nature as a bit more orderly than Hobbes because he understood there to be a natural law, existing even in the state of nature that obligated each person to 'preserve the rest of mankind'.
