Answer:
Though Hobbes and Locke lived in roughly the same period and witnessed much of the same events, their careers took them on drastically different paths that had a drastic impact on their respective philosophies. Both men grew up in relatively undistinguished families that were still wealthy enough to give them extensive educations, but Hobbes’ father was an Anglican vicar while Locke grew up in a Puritan family. After receiving his doctorate, Hobbes became heavily associated with William Cavendish, who became King Charles I’s financier during the Civil War, and briefly became the future Charles II’s tutor in mathematics. This placed Hobbes firmly on the royalist side during the Civil War, and forced him to spend much of his career in exile after Charles I’s execution. Locke, on the other hand, was the son of a cavalry officer in fellow Puritan Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, placing him firmly on the Parliamentary side in the war. As an adult, Locke worked in medicine as well as parliamentary politics under the patronage of Anthony Ashley Cooper, known as Lord Ashley and one of the founders of the English Whig movement, which sought to continue the struggle against Absolute Monarchism after the 1660 Restoration of the Stuart Dynasty. Like Hobbes, Locke also briefly faced exile when he was suspected of insurrection in the years leading up to the Glorious Revolution, and so fled to the Netherlands. Clearly, both of these men were greatly influenced by the politics surrounding them, and it is easy to see their debate as a microcosm for a much greater political struggle. Examining the actual nuances of their reasoning, however, reveals a good deal of similarities between the two men.
