Thomas Hobbes believed that people were inherently suspicious of one another and in competition with one another. This led him to propose that government should have supreme authority over people in order to maintain security and a stable society.
John Locke argued that people were born as blank slates, open to learning all things by experience. Ultimately this meant Locke viewed human beings in a mostly positive way, and so his approach to government was to keep the people empowered to establish and regulate their own governments for the sake of building good societies.
Further explanation:
Both English philosophers believed there is a "social contract" -- that governments are formed by the will of the people. But their theories on why people want to live under governments were very different.
Thomas Hobbes published his political theory in <em>Leviathan</em> in 1651, following the chaos and destruction of the English Civil War. He saw human beings as naturally suspicious of one another, in competition with each other, and evil toward one another as a result. Forming a government meant giving up personal liberty, but gaining security against what would otherwise be a situation of every person at war with every other person.
John Locke published his <em>Two Treatises on Civil Government</em> in 1690, following the mostly peaceful transition of government power that was the Glorious Revolution in England. Locke believed people are born as blank slates--with no preexisting knowledge or moral leanings. Experience then guides them to the knowledge and the best form of life, and they choose to form governments to make life and society better.
In teaching the difference between Hobbes and Locke, I've often put it this way. If society were playground basketball, Hobbes believed you must have a referee who sets and enforces rules, or else the players will eventually get into heated arguments and bloody fights with one another, because people get nasty in competition that way. Locke believed you could have an enjoyable game of playground basketball without a referee, but a referee makes the game better because then any disputes that come up between players have a fair way of being resolved. Of course, Hobbes and Locke never actually wrote about basketball -- a game not invented until 1891 in America by James Naismith. But it's just an illustration I've used to try to show the difference of ideas between Hobbes and Locke. :-)
