Of the Dissolution of Government

Chapter 19 opens by distinguishing two things easily confused: the dissolution of society, which happens when external conquest destroys the political community itself, and the dissolution of government, which happens when those who hold authority abuse the trust and forfeit their right to govern. The dissolution of government does not dissolve society; the people remain a community and may erect a new government in place of the one that has failed them.

Locke catalogues the specific acts that dissolve government from within. The legislative dissolves itself when it sets up its arbitrary will in place of promulgated, standing law; when it hinders the people from choosing their representatives freely; when it delivers the community into subjection to a foreign power; when it uses its authority to take the property of subjects without consent. The executive dissolves government when it neglects or abandons the office, leaving the laws unexecuted; when it hinders the legislative from meeting; when it uses force against the people it is supposed to protect. In each case, Locke's point is the same: the government that does these things has dissolved itself. The people have not rebelled; the government has breached the trust.

The obvious objection — that this doctrine invites perpetual rebellion — Locke meets head-on. Men are not in fact disposed to revolution at every small disturbance. Long usage and inertia make them bear much before they act. It is only when a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices all tending the same way makes the deliberate design visible that people will move — and when they do, they are not creating disorder but restoring it. The government that breached the trust created the disorder; the people who resist are enforcing the law that the government violated. Compare the Declaration of Independence: "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." Jefferson was paraphrasing Locke, almost word for word. The right of revolution is the most consequential doctrine in the Second Treatise — the one that transformed a philosophical argument into the founding document of two revolutions.