Introduction — Filmer refuted

Chapter 1 is barely a chapter — it is a bridge from the work Locke has just completed to the work he is about to begin. He summarizes, in four numbered propositions, what the First Treatise established: that Adam had no natural right of fatherhood over his children or dominion over the world of the kind Filmer claimed; that even if he had, his heirs had no right to it; that even if they did, there is no law of nature or positive law of God to determine who is the right heir; and that even if it had been settled, the knowledge of which is the eldest line descended from Adam has been so completely lost that no ruler on earth could derive benefit from it.

From these four propositions Locke draws the conclusion that frames everything that follows: it is impossible that any rulers now on earth should derive authority from what is held to be the source of all power — namely, the private dominion and paternal jurisdiction of Adam. If government cannot be grounded in divine right as Filmer imagined it, then government must be grounded in something else. That something else is what the Second Treatise will supply.

The chapter is deliberately summary and transitional. Locke knows his reader may have come to the Second Treatise without having worked through the First, and he wants to make sure the negative argument — the demolition of Filmer — is at least sketched before the positive argument begins. The Second Treatise is the more original and consequential work, but it is written against a target, and that target is Filmer. Understanding this shapes how one reads everything that follows.