Of the State of Nature

Locke opens chapter 2 with the argument's bedrock claim: to understand political power, we must consider what state all men are naturally in. That state is one of perfect freedom — free to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature. It is also a state of equality, in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another. The equality is not sameness of talent or virtue; it is the absence of any natural subordination — no one is, by nature, the subject of another.

The law of nature, accessible to any person who consults their reason, teaches that no one ought to harm another in their life, health, liberty, or possessions. And to enforce this law — since there is no government yet to do it — every person has what Locke calls the executive power of the law of nature: the right, and the duty, to punish transgressors. This is the move that most distinguishes Locke from Hobbes. For Hobbes, the absence of a sovereign means the absence of any reliable rights at all. For Locke, the absence of a sovereign does not abolish the moral order; it only makes the enforcement of that order less reliable.

The state of nature is therefore inconvenient rather than catastrophic — workable in small communities, increasingly difficult as societies grow and disputes multiply, and so naturally disposing men to combine for mutual security under common rules. The political contract, when it comes, is the considered choice of free, rational, rights-bearing beings to improve an arrangement that is, even without it, governed by moral law. This is why, for Locke, the social contract can be limited and conditional — the government it creates exists to serve the people who made it, not to replace their judgment with its own.