Which of Europe's Enlightenment Philosophers Wrote About Natural Rights: John Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and the Limits of the List

John Locke and Thomas Hobbes wrote most directly about natural rights, with Locke grounding them in a divinely given law of nature and Hobbes treating them as a claim of self-preservation that government could absorb. Baron de Montesquieu wrote less about natural rights as such and more about how law and institutions protect liberty. George Washington wrote nothing as a philosopher; he applied the language of rights as a political actor.

The question hides a trap. Three of the four names on the keyword list are European theorists, and one is an American planter-statesman who never claimed to be a philosopher. That distinction matters, because the phrase "natural rights" carried different weight in London, Paris, and Philadelphia. Locke built a theory of rights that ordinary people could claim against a king. Hobbes built a theory of rights that a sovereign could swallow. Montesquieu built a theory of liberty that depended on institutions rather than claims. Washington inherited all three conversations and used the vocabulary of the first to justify the third.

This explainer takes each thinker in turn, then compares them side by side, then examines the edge cases and misconceptions that thin summaries miss. The core mechanism is the same throughout: Enlightenment writers disagreed about where rights come from, and that disagreement determined what rights could do.

The mechanism: where rights come from, and why source determines power

Every natural-rights theory answers two questions. First, is the right prior to government or created by government? Second, who enforces it? The answers determine whether a right functions as a limit on state power or as a justification for state power.

Locke's answer rests on a chain of reasoning. God creates humans as rational creatures. Rational creatures need life, liberty, and property to fulfill their purpose. Therefore those goods are owed to them by nature, not by any king. Government exists to protect rights that already exist. When government fails, the people retain a right of resistance. The mechanism is theological at its base and legal in its operation: rights are real because God made them real, and they are enforceable because the social contract is conditional.

Hobbes's answer inverts the chain. In the state of nature, every person has a right to everything, including the bodies of others. That unlimited right produces a war of all against all. To escape, people transfer their rights to a sovereign. After the transfer, the sovereign's commands define right and wrong. The natural right survives only as a right of self-defense when the sovereign threatens your life. Hobbes gave rights a secular and egalitarian foundation but drained them of their power to limit government. As he put it in Leviathan, the sovereign is the "mortal god" to whom subjects owe obedience.

Montesquieu's answer sidesteps the question. In The Spirit of the Laws, he argued that law must fit a nation's climate, commerce, religion, and history. Liberty is not a list of abstract claims but a condition produced by separated powers and moderate institutions. His famous mechanism was the division of legislative, executive, and judicial authority, each checking the others. Rights language appears in his work, but his real contribution is institutional design rather than rights theory. He worried less about what rights people hold than about what arrangements keep power from becoming arbitrary.

Washington's answer is practical. He never wrote a treatise. His surviving writings use rights language when the political situation demanded it, but his consistent focus was on institutions that could secure those rights over time. He presided over the Constitutional Convention, and his Farewell Address warns against faction and foreign entanglement rather than elaborating a theory of nature. He is best understood as a consumer and defender of Enlightenment rights talk, not a producer of it.

Plain language: Locke said rights come before government, Hobbes said government comes before rights, and Montesquieu said institutions come before either.

The timeline: how the idea moved, 1651 to 1791

The dates matter because the sequence shows a shift in function. Hobbes in 1651 used natural right to build a case for absolute authority. Locke in 1689 used it to build a case for resistance. Montesquieu in 1748 shifted attention from claims to machinery. By 1789 the vocabulary had become revolutionary currency in both America and France. The same words did different political work in each setting.

One counterintuitive detail: the US Bill of Rights, often treated as the purest expression of Lockean natural rights, was originally a structural amendment package. Several of its provisions, including the separation-of-powers logic behind the Tenth Amendment, owe more to Montesquieu than to Locke. The Lockean core is real, but the architecture is mixed.

Quantified context: how much did each writer actually say?

Word counts give a rough sense of emphasis, and the spread is large. Locke's Two Treatises runs roughly 150,000 words, with the Second Treatise devoting a full chapter to natural rights and another to property. Hobbes's Leviathan runs roughly 200,000 words, and the natural-rights discussion is concentrated in Chapters 13 through 15. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws runs roughly 250,000 words across 31 books, and the phrase "natural rights" appears far less often than "liberty," "moderation," or "power."

The asymmetry sharpens when you count specific chapters. Locke gives property its own numbered chapter and builds the labor theory of value there. Montesquieu gives liberty several books but frames liberty as security under law rather than as a natural claim. Hobbes gives natural right one foundational chapter and then subordinates it to sovereignty. The numbers confirm what close reading shows: Locke is the natural-rights writer of the four, Hobbes is the natural-rights problem, and Montesquieu is the institutional answer.

Enrollment in the canon also matters for your question. Stanford's online Encyclopedia of Philosophy and similar reference works treat Locke and Hobbes as the canonical natural-law and natural-rights theorists of the English tradition. Montesquieu is canonized in political sociology and constitutional design. Washington appears in histories of the founding, not in histories of philosophy. If you are searching for "Enlightenment philosophers who wrote about natural rights," Washington is not the answer, and any source that lists him as a philosopher is blurring categories.

Edge cases: what the quote-mining gets wrong

First edge case: Locke's property right is not what most online summaries say. Locke's famous labor-mixing argument includes a limiting condition. A person may appropriate only "as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils." He also ties legitimate property to "enough, and as good left in common for others." Modern Libertarian readings tend to skip those clauses, but they are in the text. The twentieth-century scholar C. B. Macpherson argued that Locke's property theory was already preparing the case for market society, and the dispute is unresolved. Either way, the limiting clauses exist and matter for any rigorous reading.

Second edge case: Hobbes did write about natural rights, contrary to the common claim that he is only a theorist of absolutism. Chapter 14 of Leviathan defines the right of nature as "the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature." The disagreement is about consequences, not about whether the concept exists. Hobbes's sovereign is limited in principle by the subject's inalienable right of self-defense. He explicitly says a person may resist those who assault him.

Third edge case: Montesquieu is not a natural-rights minimalist by accident. His method was comparative and empirical. He studied constitutional systems, climate effects, commerce, and legal history, and his aim was to explain why laws vary and how liberty survives under different conditions. He did use rights language, but his theory of liberty is institutional rather than natural. If you need a strict answer to the question, Montesquieu counts as an Enlightenment philosopher who discussed liberty, not as a leading writer on natural rights.

Fourth edge case: Washington is included on many keyword lists because he used the phrase "natural rights" in public documents. His role is real but different. He advanced rights claims in politics and constitutional design. He did not produce a philosophical account of where those rights come from.

Red flags to watch for in sources:

Any source that lists Washington as a philosopher without qualification. Any summary that says Hobbes did not discuss natural rights at all. Any reading of Locke's property argument that omits the spoilage and sufficiency conditions. Any claim that Montesquieu is a minor figure, which underrates his influence on the US Constitution. Any citation to a single sentence of Locke without the surrounding chapter.

Misconceptions, corrected one at a time

Misconception one: the natural-rights tradition is a single unified theory. It is not. Locke and Hobbes agree that a right of nature exists but disagree about whether it limits the sovereign. That is not a footnote; it is the central fault line.

Misconception two: "natural rights" and "human rights" are interchangeable. They are related but distinct vocabularies. Natural rights are grounded in a claimed order of nature or divine creation. Modern human rights are grounded in international instruments and political consensus. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights draws on both lineages but does not depend on theological premises.

Misconception three: Montesquieu's separation of powers is the same argument as Locke's rights theory. It is not. Montesquieu's contribution is a mechanism for preventing tyranny. Locke's contribution is a justification for resisting tyranny. The US founding used both, and the two arguments are compatible but not identical.

Misconception four: Washington believed natural rights as a theory. The evidence shows he used the language instrumentally and institutionally. His Farewell Address warns about the danger of faction and the importance of constitutional forms. He was more interested in preserving the experiment than in defending its metaphysics.

The comparison table

The table makes the ranking explicit. For "wrote about natural rights," Locke is the primary answer, Hobbes is the direct secondary answer, and Montesquieu is a rights-adjacent institutional thinker. Rousseau is worth adding because his general will is a rival to Lockean natural-rights reasoning, and treating the two as the same is a common error. Washington does not belong in a philosophical lineup but does belong in a practical one.

One caveat from professional historians: the phrase "Enlightenment philosophers" is itself a retrospective label. None of these men called themselves that. The category was assembled in later centuries to organize a diverse set of arguments about reason, nature, and authority. That is why the keyword question produces a mismatch between the philosophical canon and the political canon.

Practical actions: how to read the sources yourself

Start with chapter-level reading, not excerpts. For Locke, read the Second Treatise, Chapters 2 through 5, before forming a view on property. For Hobbes, read Chapters 13 through 15 of Leviathan in sequence. The argument depends on order.

Separate the claim from the mechanism. For each writer, ask what makes a right real and who enforces it. That question sorts the four names in one pass.

Treat online quote collections as leads, not evidence. Verify any quoted sentence against a scholarly edition. The McMaster University Archive and the Online Library of Liberty host free authoritative texts.

Distinguish philosophy from politics when the keyword list confuses them. Washington is a political actor, and reading him as a theorist produces errors in both directions.

Use a two-question test on any source: does it name the source text, and does it distinguish rights theory from institutional design? If both answers are yes, the source is probably worth your time.

When the question itself is ambiguous, answer both readings. "Who wrote about natural rights" can mean who produced theory and who used the language. Locke answers the first, and the American founders answer the second.

The reconciliation threshold here is straightforward. The keyword list mixes two categories, and a single answer cannot satisfy both. The correct response is layered: Locke first, Hobbes second, Montesquieu as a liberty theorist, and Washington as an applier. Any source that promises a single name is oversimplifying.

Limitations: what this answer cannot settle

The historical record has gaps. Locke's Two Treatises was published anonymously in 1689, and the extent of its influence on the American founding is still debated among historians. Hobbes's reputation in his own time was contested, and his influence on later rights talk is indirect. Montesquieu's reception in America is documented but unevenly studied. Washington's private views on rights theory are largely unknowable because he wrote no treatise and his letters are practical rather than philosophical.

The keyword question also invites a false precision. "Natural rights" as a fixed phrase was not standardized across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Different writers used "right of nature," "natural liberty," and "rights of mankind" with overlapping but not identical meanings. Comparing them requires attention to vocabulary, not just to name recognition.

This article is general educational information about the history of political thought, not a legal opinion or a substitute for scholarly source criticism. For help interpreting a specific historical text or a modern legal claim about rights, consult a qualified historian or legal professional with access to the primary sources.