Of the Legislative, Executive, and Federative Power

Chapter 12 establishes the structural analysis of government that would become the blueprint of constitutional design. The legislative power is the power to direct how the force of the commonwealth shall be employed for preserving the community. But the legislative need not always be in session — laws, once made, have a constant and lasting force. Someone must execute them continuously. This is the executive power: permanent where the legislative is intermittent, subordinate to it in authority but essential to the working of the whole.

Beyond these two, Locke identifies a third power he calls the federative: the power that answers to the natural power every person had in the state of nature to deal with other individuals outside the community. Within the commonwealth, disputes are resolved by law and common judge. But between commonwealths — in the relations with foreign nations, the making of war and peace, the conclusion of leagues and alliances — there is no such common authority. The commonwealth must exercise, as a body, the power to deal with outsiders that each person once held individually. This is the federative power.

The executive and federative, Locke acknowledges, are really distinct in themselves — one concerns domestic law enforcement, the other foreign relations — but they are nearly impossible to separate in practice because both require force. Placing them in the same hands does not make them the same thing. Locke's point is conceptual rather than organizational: governments should understand that managing domestic order and managing foreign affairs are different kinds of tasks, governed by different principles, even when assigned to the same officer. The failure to understand this distinction has, in his view, caused much confusion in political thought.