Summarize social contract theory and the core ideas of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau that influenced the American founders.
Where Hobbes concluded that only an all-powerful sovereign could keep the peace, the English philosopher John Locke reached a very different conclusion in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Locke argued that people possess natural rights -- life, liberty, and property -- simply by being human, and that these rights exist even before any government does. Government's entire job, in Locke's view, is to protect those pre-existing rights. If a government instead violates them, Locke argued, the people have the right to alter or abolish it and form a new one. This idea, that government exists to serve the governed and holds legitimate power only with their consent, became known as social contract theory, and it would echo, almost word for word, in a document written nearly ninety years later.
Two more Enlightenment thinkers shaped the American founding just as directly. The French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), studied the English government and concluded that liberty survives best when political power is divided among separate branches -- one to make laws, one to enforce them, one to interpret them -- so that no single person or body can grow too powerful. The Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract (1762), argued that legitimate government must rest on the "general will" of the people as a whole, a form of popular sovereignty in which the community, not a king, is the true source of law. Few, if any, of the American founders agreed completely with any one of these four thinkers -- but together, Hobbes's warning, Locke's natural rights, Montesquieu's separated powers, and Rousseau's popular sovereignty gave them nearly every idea they needed to design a government.
Mastery looks like: They can name Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, state one core idea from each, and identify at least one specific place where Locke's or Montesquieu's ideas appear directly in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
Common stumbles: Mixing up which philosopher goes with which idea, especially confusing Hobbes's pessimistic state of nature with Locke's more optimistic one.