Second Treatise of Government — themes & analysis

Locke opens the argument where Hobbes opened his: the state of nature, a thought experiment about what human life would look like without government. The two answers could not be more different. For Hobbes, the state of nature is the war of all against all — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For Locke, it is a state of perfect freedom and equality, governed by the law of nature, which is reason itself.

The law of nature teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Every person in the state of nature has the right — indeed the duty — to enforce this law against violators. This is what Locke calls the executive power of the law of nature: the right to punish transgressors that every person holds before governments exist to do it institutionally. The state of nature is therefore not without moral order; it is only without a single, reliable enforcer of that order.

This is the move that changes everything. Because the state of nature already has a moral structure, the social contract that creates government is not a desperate bargain among frightened animals but a considered choice among rational, rights-bearing persons. They give up the inconvenience of being judge in their own case; they gain the security of a common authority. But they give up nothing more. The fundamental rights — life, liberty, and property — are not surrendered to government. They are the reason government exists.

The difference between Locke's starting point and Hobbes's is the difference between liberalism and absolutism. If the state of nature is merely inconvenient, the social contract can be limited and revocable. If it is catastrophic, only absolute sovereignty will do, and no resistance is permissible. Locke's entire anti-absolutist programme depends on chapter 2: show that the state of nature is governed by reason, and every subsequent argument for limited government follows.

Where to follow it: Ch 2 (the state of nature), Ch 3 (the state of war distinguished), Ch 9 (the ends of political society), Ch 19 (when the state of nature returns).

Chapter 5 opens with a question Locke's contemporaries thought unanswerable: God gave the earth to mankind in common. How then does any individual come to own anything in particular? Without a theory of private property, there can be no theory of government to protect it. Locke's answer is the labour theory of property, and it has been argued over for three hundred years.

The argument turns on self-ownership. Every person has a property in his own person; to this, nobody else has any right. From self-ownership flows ownership of one's own labour. And from ownership of labour flows ownership of whatever one mixes one's labour with — the acorns picked up under an oak, the land tilled from a state of waste. Labour removes things from the common stock of nature and makes them particular. The appropriation is legitimate because it is the extension of the one indisputable ownership — the ownership of oneself.

Locke sets two limits. The sufficiency proviso: one may appropriate only while there is enough and as good left in common for others. The spoilage proviso: one may take only as much as one can use before it perishes; nothing was made by God for man to waste. Within these limits, property in the state of nature is natural and just.

The decisive move comes when Locke introduces money — a durable, non-perishable medium of exchange that men have agreed by tacit consent to use as a store of value. Money dissolves the spoilage limit: one can accumulate without waste by converting perishable goods into durable currency. This, Locke says, is the historical origin of unequal property holdings — legitimate, because the consent to use money implies consent to the inequality it produces. Whether chapter 5 is the charter of capitalist accumulation or a careful theory of natural limits on it, depending on which paragraph one stops at, has been argued ever since.

Where to follow it: Ch 5 (property and labour), Ch 9 (property as the end of government), Ch 11 (no taxation without consent), Ch 16 (conquest cannot transfer property).

The spine of the Second Treatise is a single claim: no one can be deprived of his natural liberty and put under the political power of another without his own consent. Government by force, government by divine right, government by inheritance — none of these produces legitimate authority. Only consent does. This is the argument that made the book dangerous in 1689 and has shaped constitutional government ever since.

Locke distinguishes express from tacit consent. Express consent is given by those who explicitly join a political society — by oath, by naturalization, by active compact. Tacit consent is given by those who enjoy the benefits of life under the laws — who own property, travel on the roads, do business in the markets of a political community. The enjoyment of those benefits, for as long as one remains within the jurisdiction, constitutes tacit consent and binds one to obedience.

The doctrine of tacit consent is the most criticised part of the argument. It is not obvious that merely existing in a country amounts to consenting to its government in any morally serious sense — especially for those who cannot leave, or who have no alternative. Locke himself was aware of the problem, though he does not solve it. What he insists on is the normative principle: the burden of proof falls on those who claim authority over free persons, and what they must produce, somewhere in the chain, is consent.

The political consequence of the consent doctrine is enormous. It ruled out every hereditary monarchy that could not justify itself by the voluntary agreement of its subjects. It ruled out conquest as a title to legitimate rule. It ruled out paternal authority as a model for political authority. Locke's chapter 8, on the beginning of political societies, is a long argument that all the historical examples of apparently natural authority are really examples of tacit or express consent in disguise — that consent is the only story that makes government intelligible.

Where to follow it: Ch 7 (political society formed), Ch 8 (beginning of societies), Ch 11 (legislative must rule by consent), Ch 15 (the three powers compared).

Chapter 11 is the constitution before constitutions. Locke identifies four limits on legislative power that flow from the very purpose for which government was instituted. The legislative cannot rule by arbitrary, extemporary decrees; it must govern by promulgated, standing laws, the same for everyone. It cannot take any person's property without consent — which means, in practice, that taxation requires the consent of the people or their representatives. It cannot transfer its legislative authority to anyone else, since the people delegated it specifically and not for re-delegation. And it cannot, finally, put anyone outside the reach of the law.

These four limits are not arbitrary restrictions. They follow from the fact that government is fiduciary. The people do not surrender their rights to government; they delegate specific powers for specific purposes. The legislative holds those powers in trust. When it exceeds the trust — rules arbitrarily, taxes without consent, governs by different rules for different people, gives its authority away — it has not merely made a mistake; it has forfeited its right to govern.

The executive, for its part, is subordinate to the legislative and must carry out the laws. There is also the federative power — Locke's term for what today would be called foreign affairs: the power to make war, peace, treaties, and alliances. The federative is naturally lodged with the executive because both require force, but Locke insists they are conceptually distinct. And then there is prerogative: the power to act for the public good without prescription of law, or even against it in emergencies. Prerogative is necessary, Locke concedes, but it is inherently dangerous — the history of its abuse is the history of encroaching tyranny.

What holds the whole structure together is accountability. The legislative is accountable to the people who elected it. The executive is accountable to the legislative. Prerogative is accountable, ultimately, to the people's judgment of whether it has been used well. Every power in the state has a purpose for which it was instituted and an authority to which it must answer. This is Locke's constitutionalism: not just a set of rights but a set of accountability relationships, each one traced back to the original grant of power from the people.

Where to follow it: Ch 11 (limits of the legislative), Ch 12 (legislative, executive, federative), Ch 13 (subordination of powers), Ch 14 (prerogative).

Chapter 19 is the longest chapter in the Second Treatise and the one that made Locke a revolutionary text rather than a philosophical one. He begins by distinguishing the dissolution of society — which happens when foreign conquest destroys the political community itself — from the dissolution of government, which happens when those who hold authority abuse the trust and forfeit their right to govern.

The grounds for forfeiture are specific. The legislative dissolves itself when it sets up its arbitrary will in place of established law; when it changes the rules of election to exclude the people from any meaningful share in governance; when it delivers the people into subjection to a foreign power. The executive dissolves government when it neglects and abandons the care of public good; when it hinders the legislative from meeting; when it acts against the laws. In every case, the violation of trust terminates the authority — and when authority is terminated, the people are restored to their natural freedom to provide for themselves by erecting a new legislative.

The obvious charge against this doctrine is that it invites perpetual rebellion. Locke meets it directly. Men are not in fact disposed to revolution at every small disturbance; long usage and inertia make them bear much before they move. It is only when a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices all tending the same way makes the design visible that the people will act. And when they do, they are not violating the law — they are enforcing it. The government dissolved itself first.

Compare the Declaration of Independence, 1776: "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 — not because the Declaration needed a philosophical pedigree but because the argument was the same argument. The right of revolution is the most consequential doctrine Locke ever wrote, and its consequences are still arriving.

Where to follow it: Ch 18 (tyranny defined), Ch 19 (dissolution of government), Ch 16 (conquest vs. legitimate rule), Ch 17 (usurpation).