Two Treatises of Government

12 Key excerpts on "Two Treatises of Government"

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  John Locke

  • Eric Mack(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  My working hypothesis in this work is that Locke provides an impressive, if not decisive, philosophical case for the key tenets cited above—except, for his doctrine of consent. I will document Locke’s subscription to these core tenets, identify the key philosophical arguments that Locke offers for them, and display the persuasive force of Locke’s arguments.

  Fortunately, space does not permit me to enter expressly into the many deep scholarly controversies about how to interpret Locke’s writings in political philosophy. While I do not think that everything Locke says relevant to political philosophy can be fit into the representation of Locke’s position that I develop, I believe that more of what Locke says—especially more of what is really central to Locke’s distinctive vision—cannot be fit into alternative interpretations of Locke.

  Locke’s best known work in political philosophy—the very core of Lockean political philosophy—is the Second Treatise of Government, which is Book II of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.2 The Second Treatise takes us through the following key topics: the state of nature in which men are naturally equal and free; the law of nature which governs men in the state of nature; property rights; the introduction of money and the development of commercial society; the inconveniences of the state of nature and the need for and purpose of government; the origin of legitimate government in the consent of the governed; and the legitimacy of resistance to government which acts contrary to or fails to serve its specific purpose. The four chapters that follow this introduction track the logical arrangement of topics that Locke provides for us in the Second Treatise. The second chapter of this work deals with Locke’s understanding of the state of nature and the law of nature that governs that state. The third chapter provides an account of Locke’s doctrine of property rights, certain restrictions that apply to those rights, the invention of money, and the rise of commercial society. The fourth chapter concerns the inconveniences that beset the state of nature, the purpose of political authority, and the manner in which consent is supposed to give rise to political society and government. The fifth chapter deals largely with the grounds for resistance when those with political power either violate or fail to carry out their authorized purpose. The sixth chapter of this work examines Locke’s important arguments in defense of religious toleration. These arguments are primarily advanced in the second most read of Locke ’s works within political philosophy—his A Letter Concerning Toleration (1983). As we shall see, the arguments of the Second Treatise and of the Letter are

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  Reading Political Philosophy

  Machiavelli to Mill

  • Derek Matravers, Jonathan Pike, Nigel Warburton(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 John Locke: Second Treatise of Government Jon Pike

  By the end of this chapter you should:

  • Have read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and studied the most important sections in detail.
  • Have a good understanding of Locke’s political theory.
  • Be able to offer some criticism of that theory.
  • Have continued and entrenched the discussion of the sources of rightful political authority.
  • Be aware of some contemporary interpretations of Locke and of his continuing relevance to political philosophy.
  • Have further developed your reading skills.

  Introduction

  Locke is widely held to be one of the founders of modern liberalism, and his Second Treatise of Government, with its clear advocacy of limited government, is one of liberalism’s founding documents. There are echoes of the language of the Second Treatise in the Constitution of the United States and in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Second Treatise was not written in order to ‘found liberalism’ but to make a contribution to a political debate in England about the limits of a legitimate sovereign.

  For some time it was thought that the Second Treatise was a post hoc justification of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 which deposed James II and put William of Orange on the British throne. But most historians believe that both the first and second treatises were composed between the years 1679 and 1682, and published later in the more favourable political climate after the Glorious Revolution.

  The Two Treatises of Government were written at a time when Locke’s political patron, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, and probably Locke himself, were heavily involved in revolutionary politics. Shaftesbury was a leading figure in the Whig attempt to push through an Exclusion Bill (1680) which would prevent Charles II’s Roman Catholic brother James from inheriting the throne. For the Whig opponents of James, Catholicism was indissolubly tied to absolutism on the French model. Recent scholarship has shown how far Locke’s work reflects the revolutionary pamphlets of the time, and suggests that he was providing ‘a political declaration for the revolutionary movement of the 1680s’ (Ashcraft (1986

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  Technology and the End of Authority

  What Is Government For?

  • Jason Kuznicki(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Our rights, meanwhile, may be recognized either as natural or as conventional, or per- haps as a mix of the two, without necessarily invalidating various proposals to refine the process of securing them. As a result, much of liberal political philosophy since Hobbes has tried to answer something like the follow- ing question: Can we find better means to the ends that Hobbes wanted, namely securing the prospects of peace and material security? Another question is closely related to this one and also important in the history of liberalism: Shall the conventions that we set up simply provide a framework that allows us to pursue material security? Or shall our institu- tions attempt to provide material security more directly? To what extent, if any, does the attempt to provide material security more directly come to interfere with the framework of liberal political ends? These questions lead us to the political thought of John Locke. LOCKE: GOVERNMENT IS A MEDIATOR Much intrigue surrounds the writing of John Locke’s Two Treatises and, in particular, the question of exactly when Locke wrote them. Ordinarily a question like this might not seem to matter so much, but for the Two Treatises, it does. Oddly, Locke appears to have destroyed all evidence of THE SOCIAL CONTRACTARIANS: CAN AN AGREEMENT SPECIFY WHAT... 98 its drafting and all references to it in his personal papers. 28 The explanation for why he would do so bears surprisingly on our focal question. Students often first encounter the mystery surrounding the Two Treatises in Peter Laslett’s masterful introduction to the edition found in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. The con- ventional dating of the Treatises had held, prior to Laslett, that they were written with a view toward justifying the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary in 1688.

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  Locke's Two Treatises of Government

  • Richard Ashcraft(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1:1, 5; 2:23, 12; 4:12, 11). Hence ‘religion, law and morality… are matters of the highest concernment’ and supply the framework for the rest of our thoughts (3:9, 22). In the Second Treatise, Locke premisses his discussion of political theory upon the supposition that ‘men being all the workmanship of one Omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker… [they] are sent into the world by his order and about his business’ (II, 6). This hierarchical ordering of ideas and actions recurs throughout Locke’s writings. In order to appreciate what importance the argument of the Two Treatises of Government – indeed, any political argument – could have had for Locke, therefore, we need to have some idea of the criteria and presuppositions he employed in his treatment of political phenomena. Locke was hardly alone among his contemporaries in the general viewpoint he adopted, and, were it not for our distance from the seventeenth century in temperament and philosophical outlook, the fact that the nature and role of God are essential to an understanding of his social and political ideas would scarcely be worth mentioning. We could simply assume, as Locke did, the Deity’s importance and pass immediately to a consideration of the implications of that assumption as they relate to some particular topic. It is precisely Locke’s conviction that no one would deny the validity of this essential presupposition that renders unnecessary, from his standpoint, a detailed elaboration of all the interrelated assumptions and arguments that he attaches to this premiss

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  Philosophy

  Made Simple

  • Richard H. Popkin, Avrum Stroll(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  For him these were the only choices which a citizen faced. But as Locke was to show these were not the only alternatives; it is possible to have both law and order and the absence of tyranny. The political philosophy of John Locke It is accurate to say that John Locke is the theoretical architect of democracy as it exists in the western world today. His ideas, as expressed in his famous Second Treatise on Civil Government, were influential in forming the political philosophy of the founders of the American and French Republics. A careful study of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution reveals both documents to be replete with phrases such as 'All men are created equal', 'Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', 'We hold these truths to be self-evident', and so forth, which are culled almost literally from the Second Treatise. In using the word 'men' in what follows we shall follow the usage of Locke and the constitutional forefathers who were thinking mainly of the male sex. In contemporary political thought these views are usually taken as applying to men and women equally. Like Hobbes, Locke lived in a period of great social unrest. Involved in intrigue against the king, he was forced to flee England twice during his life, once in 1675 and again in 1679. But unlike Hobbes, these events did not sour his outlook on human nature. Both in this respect, and in his theory as to the proper function of government, he is diametrically opposed to Hobbes. Let us examine this theory in some detail. Like Hobbes in the Leviathan, Locke begins the Second Treatise with what seems to be a historical account of the origin of government, using, like Hobbes, the notion of a social contract. The account begins with an important distinction which was undoubtedly directed at Hobbes: the distinction between life in a 'state of nature' and life in a 'state of war'. In the state of nature, men live on the whole peaceably.

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  Contract, Culture, and Citizenship

  Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls

  • Mark E. Button(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  1. John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman,” in Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) (major and minor essays from the Bodleain and British libraries) (hereafter PE), 351. All references to Locke’s works are to the following editions: Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954) (hereafter ELN); The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James L. Axtell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968); A Letter Concerning Tolera- tion, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983); Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996); The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. George Ewing (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1965); Two Treatises of Government, student edition, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) (hereafter First Treatise and Second Treatise, followed by paragraph number); An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover Publications, 1959) (hereafter ECHU); The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London, 1801); The Life of John Locke, with Extracts from His Correspondence, Journals and Common-place Books, ed. Peter King, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1830). Late in his life John Locke offered the following distinction for those who might follow his approach to the study and practice of politics: “Politics contains two parts very different the one from the other. The one con- taining the original of societies, and the rise of and extent of political power, the other the art of governing men in society.” 1 I propose to treat these two parts of politics, and these two dimensions of Locke’s moral and political thought, in succession over the next two chapters.

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  Revolution by Degrees

  James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century

  • J. Rudolph(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  47 In his occasional writings and in his theoretical exposition of natural law and contract Locke does not simply provide the basis for an expan- sive and inclusive definition of the individual, but he also reaffirms standard, limiting, and exclusionary beliefs about exactly who is 162 Revolution by Degrees rational and has life, liberty and property to protect. The presence of these conservative assumptions and the impact of this Lockean and Whig ambivalence should not be ignored. 48 More, perhaps, has been made of the progressive meaning of Locke’s theory with regard to the inclusion of unpropertied men in the notion of the sovereign people, and the expansion of the political nation. The Two Treatises has been depicted as a ‘democratic’ and a ‘communitarian’ work. 49 It has also been argued, however, that Locke’s insistence upon the equality and freedom of all men in the Two Treatises is developed along with some less egalitarian ideas about the exercise of reason and the development of private prop- erty. 50 For Locke, as for many Whig writers, assumptions about the natural and necessary development of family, inheritance, economy and society once again shape the definition of a person and a citizen, and affect the envisioned composition of the sovereign people. Locke, like Tyrrell, works within the natural law literature as he legit- imates private property and founds government upon property rights in the Second Treatise. The fifth chapter, ‘Of Property’, is one of the most scrutinized sections of this work and there is an enormous literature surrounding Locke’s theory of property, his treatment of the invention of money, the evolution of laws of inheritance, and issues of tacit versus express consent. 51 Within the property theory outlined there necessary inequalities can be seen to evolve according to Locke’s understanding of human nature following its law and the divine plan in the development and distribution of property.

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  Why Politics Matters

  An Introduction to Political Science

  • Kevin Dooley, Joseph Patten, Kevin Dooley(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  In Table 3.2, we provide a brief compari- son of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory against the social contract theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. MODERN POLITICAL THEORY 71 John Locke Hobbes’s view of human nature as self-interested and his call for an authoritarian government to prevent society from degenerating into chaos and civil war was directly challenged by John Locke in his classic work titled Two Treatises of Govern- ment in 1690. Locke was a British political philosopher who both influenced and was influenced by England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. Although considered a “bloodless” revolution, the insurrection was successful in driving England’s King James II into exile in France, thereby officially ending the dominance of the Eng- lish monarch. King James II was a polarizing figure who, through the use of force, undermined the laws of Parliament and sought to convert England to Catholicism. The British Parliament in 1689 offered the vacant throne to Prince William and his wife Mary. But this authority was conferred under conditions set forth in a new Brit- ish Bill of Rights that stripped from the throne considerable fiscal and military pow- ers. The British monarch was no longer empowered to appropriate funds or to raise armies during peaceful times without the consent of the British Parliament. A new English era of Parliamentary government (see Chapter 6) had begun.

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  Reflections on Political Theory

  A Voice of Reason from the Past

  • N. Wood(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  St Augustine relies mainly on theology, and St Thomas welds together Aristotelianism and Christianity to bear the intellectual weight of his recommendations. Hobbes fashions an architectonic structure of intimately related ideas that endow his advocacy of supreme sovereign power with rational authenticity. At least in the Two Treatises, Locke formulates a doctrine of individual natural rights based on Christian natural law and a novel stress on labour, coupling it with shrewd practical perception to provide the basis for an ideal of responsible constitutional government. Rousseau forges a primi- tive anthropology and developmental social psychology in the Second Discourse – largely the product of a fertile and illuminating imagination – to justify in part his later espousal of democracy and social equality. Burke’s interpretation of the organic growth of the English constitution with its venerable customs and traditions is the Character of Political Theory 65 authoritative grounding of his opposition to sweeping reform and radical political change. Marx synthesizes Hegelian philosophy, the principles of British political economy, and the tenets of French socialism, combined with an acute perception of historical process and a sensitivity to contemporary social history, to fashion a novel system of ideas from which his political prescriptions emanate. An integral and significant part of the justificatory efforts of politi- cal theorists is a conception of human nature, in some instances systematically developed, in others, vague and imprecisely formu- lated. The former theorists work out a rudimentary psychology and anthropology, while the latter often without detailed discussion make reference to and accept the Christian doctrine of original sin, or some modified, secular version of it.

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  Locke

  • Edward Feser(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas) is a contemporary defense of Strauss’s controversial reading of Locke.

  Jeremy Waldron’s analysis of the religious basis of Locke’s political philosophy is presented in his God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Other studies emphasizing the same theme include Greg Forster, John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Ross Harrison, Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion’s Masterpiece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  Waldron provides a detailed examination of Locke’s theory of property in his The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Three other important studies of Locke on property are Matthew Kramer, John Locke and the Origins of Private Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Gopal Sreenivasan, The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) is the most influential contemporary defense of a quasi-Lockean political philosophy. Against anarchists who suggest that private protection firms could do the job Locke thinks only government can, Nozick argues that even an anarchist society featuring such firms would inevitably evolve into one ruled by a government, and in a way that violates no one’s rights. He also defends the inegalitarian implications of Lockean theories of property. I defend these controversial arguments in my book On Nozick (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003). That the assumption that natural resources start out unowned entails a radically libertarian view of property rights is a proposition I defend at greater length in my essay “There Is No Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition” (in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Rights Liberalism from Locke to Nozick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)). In “Personal Identity and Self-Ownership” (in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Personal Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)), I defend at greater length the suggestion that Lockean and other reductive theories of personal identity are incompatible with a robust notion of self-ownership. Roger Scruton discusses nationality and political community in (among other writings) his short book The Need for Nations

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  The Idea of Political Representation and Its Paradoxes

  • Andrzej Waskiewicz(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

    (Publisher)

  An absolute ruler instituted by a contract between individuals concluded in order to get out of the state of nature does not himself belong to political society, which means that he remains in the state of nature vis-à-vis its every member. He makes laws in order to prevent enmities between his subjects from turning into open aggression, but he himself is not subject to those laws 228 . A question suggests itself, and Locke poses it regardless of Hobbes’ arguments: 227 Hobbes’ name is not mentioned at all in the Second Treatise of Government; there is one mention of ‘the mighty Leviathan’, which would be powerless if the govern- ment had to be constituted by the consent of every individual rather than by the consent of the majority of a political society; cf. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government in: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge – New York – New Rochelle – Melbourne – Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), § 98, p. 332–333. Leo Strauss claims that Locke was a prudent man who knew what he could discuss and what he should pass over in silence, and ‘judiciously refrained as much as he could from mentioning Hobbes’s “justly decried name” ’; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History. A Cogent Examination of One of the Most Significant Issues in Modern Political and Social History (The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1965), p. 166. Peter Laslett on his part observes that even though Locke thoroughly knew Hobbes’ work and ‘never escaped the shadow of Leviathan’, he did not refer to or comment on any of his ideas in his Treatise; cf. Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction,’ in: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge – New York – New Rochelle – Melbourne – Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 72–74.

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  A History of Western Political Thought

  • J. S. McClelland, Dr J S Mcclelland(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Locke speaks for the others. His patron was the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the exclusion party (in his other role as medical man Locke had performed a successful operation on Shaftesbury for the stone), and it seems that Locke began writing the Second Treatise early in the 1680s when exclusion was in the air, and he had probably finished it by 1683. It was published to support the Glorious Revolution of 1688 because it fitted that case so perfectly, not least because, pace Hobbes and James II, the State of Nature which England returned to after the departure of its Sovereign, James II, turned out to be Lockian, not Hobbesian, after all. LOCKE AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM Liberals have always shown a certain fondness for Locke, and it is easy to see why. Certain assumptions which Locke makes, certain attitudes which he held, and certain Social contract II 231 arguments which he uses, fit in well with the doctrine which at the beginning of the nineteenth century came to be called liberalism. Some commentators go further, and say that Locke invented liberalism practically single-handedly, but that is to exaggerate. Too much of at least English liberalism came out of utilitarianism, a doctrine antithetical to Natural Rights, for this claim on Locke’s behalf to be sustained. None the less, if you look hard enough in Locke, it is possible to find a thumbnail sketch of something which is at least beginning to look like liberalism. The first liberal-looking assertion in Locke is the naturalness of property and the inviolability of property right except by free and voluntary consent: what we have come to call consent to taxation. Nine points of positive law will be about who rightfully owns what. What makes something mine is either that I have inherited it or, better still, that I have worked for it. Mixing one’s labour with something is the surest title to possession of all.

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