DEEP READ · 90
Second Treatise of Government · John Locke · 1689
The book opens on an odd question: what would people be like if government did not exist at all? Locke's answer is that they would already possess life, liberty, property — and the right to punish anyone who violated them. That leaves government only one possible origin: people voluntarily hand over one of those rights (the right to enforce the law themselves) in exchange for an impartial judge. And since the power is borrowed, entrusted for a stated purpose, when it turns against the very things it was trusted to protect, taking it back is not rebellion — the real rebel is the ruler who broke the trust.
John Locke (1632–1704) was a physician turned philosopher, personal doctor and political operator to the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs. The Two Treatises appeared anonymously in 1689 (the title page reads 1690): the First demolishes, line by line, Robert Filmer's Patriarcha (kingship descends from Adam's paternal authority); the Second builds the positive case. It belongs to the same social-contract tradition as Hobbes's Leviathan and Rousseau's Social Contract, yet reaches nearly the opposite conclusion from almost the same starting point — which is why it became the common ancestor of three centuries of liberalism, written constitutions, and arguments for a right of revolution.
The state of nature is not a jungle but a thought experiment: subtract political authority entirely and see what is left between persons. Locke writes (paraphrased): "The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." (§6)
The point is that no government does not mean no rules. Morality runs at full strength in Locke's state of nature; what is missing is only institutions. So why would anyone obey that law? Here lies a premise modern readers usually skip past, though the whole building rests on it — what scholars call the workmanship argument: we are God's handiwork and God's property, sent into the world on his business, so nobody has the right to destroy himself or anyone else. Suicide included. Equality in Locke is not an empirical observation but a deduction: none of us owns another, because all of us belong to the same higher owner.
What, then, is wrong with the state of nature? Locke's answer is strikingly mild. It lacks three things: (1) a settled, published law everyone acknowledges; (2) an impartial judge; (3) a power able to enforce the verdict. (§§124–126, paraphrased) Note his word: inconvenience, not catastrophe. That understatement is the most consequential in the book. Precisely because the state of nature is merely inconvenient rather than hellish, what people must surrender to escape it is small — they need not, as in Hobbes, stake everything in order to stay alive.
| Hobbes, Leviathan | Locke, Second Treatise | |
| State of nature | War of all against all; no right or wrong | Free, equal, bound by natural law; merely "inconvenient" |
| What people give up | Nearly all rights, keeping only self-preservation | Only the right to enforce the law themselves |
| Ruler and people | Sovereign is not a party to the contract, so cannot breach it | A trust: the trustee answers to those who trusted him |
| Property | Defined by the sovereign; before that, nothing is "mine" | Precedes government; government only guards it |
| Right to resist | No (unless your life itself is at stake) | Yes — and it does not count as rebellion |
Same contractarian vocabulary; an inch of difference at the start, a mile at the finish.
Locke concedes this will "seem a very strange doctrine": in the state of nature every person has the right to punish violators of natural law — not only the victim, but anyone. The reasoning is blunt: a law nobody can enforce is a dead letter; if natural law really binds, the power to enforce it must sit somewhere, and before government there is nowhere for it to sit except in each of us.
Two limits apply. Punishment may reach only as far as deterrence and reparation — proportion, not revenge — and while anyone may punish, only the injured party may claim damages.
This section is the true hinge of the book; skip it and everything downstream turns into slogans. Because you already hold a share of enforcement power, you have something to hand over. Government power is then neither spontaneously generated nor handed down by God to kings: it is the pooled, delegated enforcement power of many individuals. And one very hard corollary drops straight out: government cannot possess any power that individuals did not possess in the state of nature. No individual has arbitrary power over life — his own included — so no state can hold arbitrary power of life and death over its subjects. There is no channel through which such a power could have arrived. The elegance is in the form of the argument: Locke is not pleading for limits on royal power, he is showing that unlimited royal power cannot logically be assembled in the first place.
Locke faces a genuine puzzle. If God gave the world to humankind in common, where does private property come from? If every act of appropriation required the consent of all mankind, we would have starved waiting for the vote.
His solution is mixing: "Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his." (§27) Pick an acorn and you have mixed something already yours — your labour — into something held in common; anyone who now takes the acorn takes a piece of you along with it. Property does not begin with land. It begins with yourself.
The mixing metaphor later took a famous hit from Robert Nozick: if I pour a can of tomato juice I own into the sea, have I acquired the sea, or merely lost my tomato juice? Mixing alone does not generate ownership; a step is missing. The gap is still live territory in political philosophy.
Locke also buried a charge here that detonated much later: most of the value in things is made by labour. Comparing cultivated ground with waste, he puts the ratio at ten to one and even a hundred to one, then concludes that it is labour which "puts the difference of value on every thing" (paraphrased). The same sentence was picked up by Ricardo and Marx and reground into a weapon pointing the other way: Locke used it to justify private ownership; Marx used it to show that surplus value is taken from the person who made it.
Locke did not issue private property an unlimited credit line. He installed two gates:
With both gates shut, early holdings stay naturally modest. So where does today's vast disparity come from? Locke's answer is startlingly cool: money. Gold and silver do not spoil, and by tacit consent people agreed that these intrinsically useless metals have value. Gate one is thereby routed around: convert the grain you cannot eat into metal that never rots and you may accumulate without limit while still, technically, wasting nothing. Locke pushes further — in agreeing to use money, people have already, "by tacit and voluntary consent," accepted a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.
Schematic: the whole chapter's weight rests on step 5 — the book's most contested move.
Why this still matters: it is the first serious attempt in history to argue that great inequality of property was not seized but agreed to. C. B. Macpherson read it as capitalism's philosophical licence; James Tully replies that Locke never retracted gate two, and that the First Treatise says plainly that a man in extreme want has a right to another's surplus — charity as a claim of right, not a favour. The dispute is unresolved, but one thing is certain: anyone who reads Locke as defending absolute, untouchable property has not finished chapter five.
"Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent." (§95) Legitimacy has exactly one source: consent. Not bloodline, not conquest, not divine appointment, not "it has always been this way."
But who ever signed anything? Locke knew about the hole and offered tacit consent: anyone who enjoys the benefits a government provides — owning land under it, living within its borders, even merely travelling one day on its highway — has tacitly consented to its jurisdiction.
Hume's reply in "Of the Original Contract" is fatal (paraphrased): to say a poor peasant is free to leave a country whose government he does not consent to is like saying a man carried aboard a ship in his sleep is free to leave it — he is, if he will jump into the ocean. Two centuries of later work on hypothetical consent and on alternative grounds of legitimacy are largely attempts to patch this hole.
One practical move rescues the scheme from paralysis: majority rule. Once people consent to form a body politic, Locke argues, that body must move by the will of the majority, or it cannot move at all — a single body cannot walk two directions at once. That step lowers the impossible standard of unanimity onto a workable floor. The majority principle we now take for granted was first derived from a premise as plain as this: otherwise the community cannot act.
Here Locke makes a substitution that looks technical and is decisive: the relation between government and people is not a contract but a trust.
A contract binds two parties with mutual obligations. A trust, a ready-made instrument in English law, is different: a settlor puts property into a trustee's hands, and the trustee must manage it for the beneficiary's benefit. The power is held on behalf of someone else.
Why the swap is lethal: inside a contract, an accusation of breach calls for a third party to arbitrate — and Hobbes used exactly that to argue that the sovereign, not being a party, can never breach and thus can never be resisted. Reframe it as a trust and the question turns around: whether the trustee has betrayed the trust is naturally for those who did the trusting to judge. The right of revolution is not a radical appendix Locke tacked on at the end; it grows directly out of that one change of noun.
"The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property." (§124) Locke's "property" is the broad sense: lives, liberties and estates together.
The legislative is the supreme power, yet four hard limits lock it in (§§135–142, paraphrased): (1) it may not be arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people — the power was pooled from individuals who never had that power to give; (2) it must govern by promulgated, settled laws, not extemporary decrees; (3) it may not take any man's property without his consent or that of his representatives — aimed squarely at taxation, not to forbid taxes but to require representation, which is the philosophical parent of "no taxation without representation"; (4) it may not transfer the power of making laws to anyone else — a trustee cannot sub-contract the trust.
On separation of powers, avoid a common misattribution: Locke divides legislative, executive, and federative power (war, peace, alliances — foreign affairs), and does not break out a separate judiciary. The familiar triad is Montesquieu's, later. Locke's reason for dividing is homely: if the people who make the laws are also the people who execute them, they will write laws for themselves and quietly exempt themselves from them.
Finally prerogative: the executive's "power to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it" (§160). Locke grants that this space must exist — no statute foresees everything, and you cannot wait for parliament to convene while the neighbour's house burns. But he immediately hands the final judgment of whether prerogative was used well or abused back to the people.
"Wherever law ends, tyranny begins." (§202)
Locke carefully separates two kinds of collapse: dissolution of society (a foreign conquest that scatters the community) and dissolution of government (betrayal from inside). When a government falls, society survives; the people need not fall back into the state of nature but may simply place the legislative power in new hands. That distinction is what makes an orderly aftermath to revolution theoretically possible.
His finest move is to reclaim the word "rebellion." Its root is re-bellare, to bring back war. Since the ruler who breaks the law by force is the one who has returned society to a state of war, he is the rebel; the people are merely taking back what they lent out.
To the objection that this "lays a ferment for frequent rebellion," Locke's answer is practical (§225, paraphrased): people are in fact slow and long-suffering; they will not rise over one or two abuses. Only when "a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices" all point the same way, making the design visible, do they move. And who judges? "The people shall be judge." (paraphrased) If no earthly appeal remains, then one may appeal to heaven — not a plea for miracles but a seventeenth-century idiom: leave the matter to force and to outcomes. A century later the phrase flew on a pine-tree flag over the American revolution.
Locke argues that slavery is the continuation of a state of war. A man cannot make himself a slave by compact, because he has no arbitrary power over his own life (he is God's workmanship), and what he does not have he cannot transfer. The one case he counts as legitimate absolute power is a captive in a just war who has forfeited his life by his own act and whose execution the victor postpones.
That passage has to be read alongside a fact: Locke was an investor in the Royal African Company, England's chartered slave-trading monopoly, and had a hand in drafting the 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted every freeman "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves." It is the most glaring contradiction in Locke scholarship and no explanation yet satisfies everyone. The honest formulation: his theory does not support plantation slavery — and he personally had a stake in it.
The book is a chain that permits no skipped links: what people are like before government → what that condition lacks → what they therefore hand over → what government can consequently possess → what to do when it exceeds that.
Compress all five steps into one line: political power has exactly one legitimate source (consent) and one legitimate purpose (preserving the lives, liberties and estates people already have); power that meets neither test is violence in good tailoring. Nineteen chapters are spent proving that single sentence.
Reading only the Second Treatise yields a narrow Locke. In the same year, 1689, he published two other works that show the system.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: there are no innate ideas; the mind arrives as blank paper (tabula rasa), and all knowledge comes from experience — outward sensation and inward reflection. This is not a separate department from politics. If nobody is born with "obey the king" engraved in his head, then every authority must be re-argued from experience and consent. The book also draws two deeply influential distinctions: primary qualities (shape, extension, motion — in the object itself) versus secondary qualities (colour, smell, sound — merely the object's power to produce sensations in us); and a strikingly modern theory of personal identity: what makes you "you" is neither a soul-substance nor a continuous body, but continuity of consciousness — in plain words, memory.
A Letter Concerning Toleration: the state's business is "outward things" — life, liberty, property — and the salvation of souls lies outside its jurisdiction. Besides, genuine belief cannot be coerced; coercion produces only people who pretend.
Read together, Locke is doing one move over and over: drawing boundaries. How far knowledge can go, how far the state may reach, how far coercion may extend. The Second Treatise is simply where that blade falls on politics.
1. Rights are not issued by government: before any government existed, people already held life, liberty, property — and the right to punish violators. Government took over only that last one.
2. The state of nature is not hell, only "inconvenient": what it lacks is not morality but three things — a settled known law, an impartial judge, and a power to enforce.
3. Because only enforcement was handed over, governmental power has a ceiling: any power no individual held in the state of nature — arbitrary power over life, for instance — no government can hold either. There is no channel by which it could have arrived.
4. "Every man has a property in his own person." (§27) Property does not start with land; it starts with you. Mix your labour into the common and it becomes yours.
5. Private property was originally penned in by two gates — no spoilage, and leave "enough, and as good" for others. Money routed around the first and legitimated unequal holdings under the name of tacit consent.
6. Government and people are not two parties to a contract but settlor and trustee: whether the trustee betrayed the trust is naturally for the one who trusted to judge. The entire right of resistance grows out of that change of noun.
7. "The great and chief end of men's uniting into commonwealths is the preservation of their property." (§124) Hence the legislative, supreme as it is, may not be arbitrary, may not rule by extemporary decree, may not take property without consent, and may not hand itself to another.
8. "Wherever law ends, tyranny begins." (§202)
9. The ruler who breaks the trust is the real rebel — he restored the state of war; replacing him is not revolt but repossession. And the people are slow: it takes a long train of abuses all pointing one way.
10. Who decides that power has overstepped? "The people shall be judge." (paraphrased) And if no earthly appeal is left, one may "appeal to heaven" — a seventeenth-century idiom meaning: let force and consequence settle it.