Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588, and John Locke died in 1704. Together they lived longer than the Stuart dynasty ruled England. Contemporaries for nearly half a century, they were virtual neighbours for several years in the 1660s and 1670s, while domiciled in the town houses of their titled patrons on the Strand. Their political theories, moreover, contain striking structural similarities. Rejection of natural or divine political hierarchies; the state of nature device; a modernized account of natural rights; individualism; a theory of social contract: these traits mark both Hobbes and Locke as participants in the new natural rights thinking of the seventeenth century.