Two Treatises of Government

Overview

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, is one of the foundational texts of modern political philosophy. It articulates a vision of political authority grounded in natural rights, consent, and the collective good — a vision that would shape the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the entire tradition of liberal democratic thought that followed.

The work is divided into two parts. The First Treatise is a lengthy, chapter-by-chapter refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, a defense of the divine right of kings that had been published in 1680 and had become the intellectual backbone of absolutist ideology in England. The Second Treatise, which is far more read and more influential, is a constructive argument for a different understanding of political authority — one based on natural law, the consent of the governed, and the right of the people to dissolve governments that violate their trust. Together, the two treatises mount a comprehensive attack on the theory of divine right and a systematic defense of what we now call liberal constitutionalism.

What makes the Two Treatises so enduringly important is not merely that it provided arguments for a particular political settlement in seventeenth-century England. It articulated principles that transcended its immediate context — principles about the moral foundations of political authority, the limits of government power, and the conditions under which resistance becomes not just permissible but obligatory. These principles continue to inform debates about rights, justice, and the proper relationship between the individual and the state.

Author

John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher and political theorist whose work spans an extraordinary range of fields, from epistemology and the philosophy of language to political philosophy, education, and theology. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is one of the founding texts of British empiricism, and his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) was a pioneering argument for religious freedom. But it is the Two Treatises of Government that secured his place as the architect of liberal political thought.

Locke lived through one of the most turbulent periods in English history. He was born into a country on the brink of civil war, came of age during the execution of Charles I and the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, and lived to see the Restoration of the monarchy, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which deposed James II and installed William and Mary on the throne. His political thought was shaped by these events, and the Two Treatises can be read as a philosophical justification of the principles that the Glorious Revolution enacted: that political authority derives from the consent of the people, that government is limited by law, and that rulers who violate the trust placed in them may be legitimately removed.

Locke was also deeply involved in the practical politics of his day. He served as secretary to the Board of Trade and Plantations, was an active investor in the slave trade (a fact that complicates his legacy as a theorist of natural liberty), and maintained close connections with the Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the leading opponents of Stuart absolutism. His philosophy was not developed in the abstract; it was forged in the heat of political conflict and directed at concrete political problems.

Historical Background

The Two Treatises was written during a period of acute political crisis in England. The Stuart monarchy, restored in 1660 after the interregnum of the Commonwealth, was increasingly seen as threatening the liberties of Parliament and the Protestant character of the nation. Charles II, though personally popular, was suspected of Catholic sympathies and absolutist ambitions. His brother and successor, James II, was openly Catholic and made no secret of his desire to centralize power and undermine the constitutional settlements that had limited royal authority since Magna Carta.

The intellectual defense of Stuart absolutism was provided by Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which argued that kings derive their authority directly from God through a chain of descent from Adam. Just as Adam had absolute authority over his family, so kings have absolute authority over their kingdoms. Political authority is patriarchal, hereditary, and divinely ordained. Resistance to the king is not merely illegal — it is a sin against God.

Locke's Two Treatises was written as a direct response to this argument. The First Treatise dismantles Filmer's case with relentless textual criticism, showing that the biblical evidence Filmer cites does not support his conclusions and that the logic of patriarchal authority, even if it were valid (which Locke denies), would not justify the claims of any actually existing European monarch. The Second Treatise then builds a positive alternative — a theory of political authority based on natural law, natural rights, and consent.

The traditional dating of the Two Treatises held that it was written in 1689 as a post hoc justification of the Glorious Revolution. But Peter Laslett's magisterial editorial work, published in 1960, demonstrated that the text was likely composed between 1679 and 1683, during the Exclusion Crisis — the political movement to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession. This revisionist dating has important implications for how we read the text. The Two Treatises was not a complacent celebration of a successful revolution. It was a radical intervention in an ongoing political struggle, arguing for principles that were, at the time of writing, deeply controversial and politically dangerous.

Key Ideas

The First Treatise: Refutation of Patriarchalism

The First Treatise is now rarely read on its own — it is repetitive, narrowly focused on biblical exegesis, and its target has long since ceased to command serious intellectual attention. But it is essential to understanding the Two Treatises as a whole, because it clears the ground for the constructive argument of the Second Treatise by demolishing the theoretical foundations of absolute monarchy.

Locke's strategy is to take Filmer's own premises — the authority of scripture, the patriarchal structure of the family, the descent of political authority from Adam — and show that they do not yield the conclusions Filmer claims. He demonstrates, through patient and exhaustive analysis of Genesis, that God's grant of dominion to Adam was not a grant of political authority over other men but a grant of property in the earth. He shows that paternal authority, even if it exists, is not the same as political authority, because fathers do not have absolute power over their children and because political authority extends to those who are not one's children. And he argues that even if Adam had possessed absolute authority, there is no way to trace a legitimate chain of descent from Adam to any current European monarch. The argument from patriarchal authority, in other words, collapses on its own terms.

The First Treatise also makes a deeper philosophical point. Filmer's theory depends on the claim that there is a single, identifiable source of political authority — the patriarchal head of the family, descended from Adam. Locke's counter-argument is that there is no such natural source. Political authority is not something that exists in nature, waiting to be discovered and claimed by the rightful heir. It is something that must be created by human beings through their collective consent. This is the principle that the Second Treatise then develops.

The Second Treatise: Natural Rights and the State of Nature

The Second Treatise begins with one of the most famous openings in the history of political thought: the description of the state of nature. Unlike Hobbes, who described the state of nature as a war of all against all — a condition of perpetual fear, insecurity, and violence — Locke describes it as a state of freedom and equality. In the state of nature, all men are free to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they see fit, within the bounds of the law of nature. And all are equal, because all are the creatures of the same God, and none has a natural right to subordinate another.

This is not, however, a state of license. The law of nature, which Locke identifies with reason, governs the state of nature and constrains what individuals may do. No one may harm another in life, liberty, health, or possessions, because all are equal and independent. The law of nature is not a positive law imposed by a sovereign — there is no sovereign in the state of nature. It is a moral law that is discoverable by reason and that binds all rational beings.

The state of nature is, for Locke, a real historical condition, not merely a theoretical construct. Human beings originally lived without government, and political society was formed by explicit agreement. But the state of nature also persists whenever there is no common authority to adjudicate disputes — between individuals in different countries, between states themselves, and between individuals who have not entered into a common political community.

The crucial problem with the state of nature is not that it is intolerable — it is, in Locke's telling, relatively peaceful — but that it is inconvenient. In the state of nature, each individual is the judge of whether the law of nature has been violated and the enforcer of its penalties. This leads to bias, partiality, passion, and revenge. People judge their own cases too leniently and the cases of their adversaries too harshly. The purpose of political society is to remedy these inconveniences by establishing a common judge, known laws, and a reliable mechanism for enforcement.

Property and Labor

Locke's theory of property is one of the most influential and controversial parts of the Two Treatises. The problem it addresses is straightforward: if God gave the earth to all mankind in common, as Genesis suggests, how can individuals come to have private property in particular parts of it? If the earth belongs to everyone, how can I claim a piece of it as mine alone?

Locke's answer is the labor theory of property. When an individual mixes their labor with a part of the natural world — by tilling soil, gathering acorns, or catching a fish — they make that part their own. The labor, which belongs to the individual as their own activity, is "mixed with" the natural resource, and this mixing creates a property right. The individual who has gathered acorns has a right to those acorns that no one else can legitimately override.

This theory is subject to important limitations. Locke's famous "enough and as good" proviso holds that appropriation is legitimate only if there is enough of the resource left for others, and what is left is as good as what was taken. And the "spoilage" proviso holds that one may appropriate only as much as one can use before it spoils — accumulating more than one can use is a violation of the law of nature. These provisos were meant to ensure that private appropriation does not undermine the common good that God intended in giving the earth to mankind.

The introduction of money complicates this picture. Money — gold and silver, which do not spoil — allows individuals to accumulate far more than they can personally use, because wealth stored in money does not violate the spoilage proviso. This leads, Locke argues, to the expansion of property holdings, the need for more extensive labor, and ultimately to the establishment of political society to protect the unequal distributions that money makes possible. Whether Locke is justifying this inequality or merely explaining it is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate, but the theory of property remains one of the most studied and contested elements of his political philosophy.

Consent and Political Obligation

The cornerstone of Locke's political theory is the principle of consent. Political authority is legitimate only if it is based on the consent of the governed. No individual has a natural right to rule over another, and no group can acquire such a right except through the voluntary agreement of those who are to be ruled. The social contract — the theory most associated with Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau — is the mechanism by which individuals leave the state of nature and form political society.

Locke's version of the social contract is distinctive. Unlike Hobbes, who argued that individuals surrender all their natural rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security, Locke insists that individuals retain their natural rights when they enter political society. They surrender only the right to individually judge and enforce the law of nature, transferring this right to the community as a whole. The purpose of government is to protect the natural rights that individuals already possess — life, liberty, and property — not to create them.

Consent, for Locke, comes in two forms. Express consent is the explicit agreement to join a political community, typically through an oath or declaration. But most people are bound by tacit consent — the implicit agreement that comes from enjoying the protection of a government and from owning property within its jurisdiction. Anyone who travels on public roads, benefits from the protection of the law, or owns land within a state's territory has tacitly consented to its authority and is obligated to obey its laws.

The notion of tacit consent has been heavily criticized. Critics from Rousseau onward have argued that it is too thin a basis for political obligation — that enjoying the benefits of a government one did not choose and cannot realistically leave is not the same as consenting to it. But Locke's theory was a powerful innovation in its time, and the principle that political authority must be grounded in the will of the people — however imperfectly realized — became one of the foundational commitments of modern democratic thought.

The Right of Revolution

The most radical and enduring element of the Two Treatises is the right of revolution. Locke argues that political authority is a trust — a delegation of power from the people to the government for the specific purpose of protecting their natural rights. When the government violates this trust — by acting arbitrarily, by invading the property of its subjects, or by attempting to enslave the people — it has declared itself in a state of war with the people. The people then have the right to dissolve the government and establish a new one.

This is not a license for frequent or casual rebellion. Locke is careful to emphasize that revolution is justified only when the government has persistently and deliberately violated the trust placed in it. Minor injustices, occasional misgovernment, and disputed interpretations of the law do not trigger the right of revolution. Only a long train of abuses, a clear pattern of tyranny that demonstrates a design to subvert the liberties of the people, justifies the recourse to force.

But when that threshold is crossed, the right is absolute. The people are the ultimate judges of whether their government has violated the trust placed in it, and they have the right to remove it by force if necessary. This is not a violation of the social contract — it is the enforcement of the social contract. The government that has betrayed its trust has forfeited its authority, and the people are returned to the state of nature, free to form a new political community on different terms.

The right of revolution was the most controversial element of the Two Treatises in its own time, and it remains contested today. Critics argue that it provides no clear criteria for when revolution is justified, that it invites instability and violence, and that it vests ultimate political authority in a diffuse and unaccountable body — "the people" — whose will is difficult to determine. Defenders argue that it is the logical conclusion of the consent principle: if political authority derives from the consent of the governed, then the governed must have the ultimate right to withdraw that consent. The American founders drew directly on Locke's argument in the Declaration of Independence, and the right of revolution remains a touchstone of liberal political thought, the principle that stands behind every democratic constitution as the ultimate safeguard against tyranny.

Legacy

The Two Treatises of Government is one of the most influential political texts ever written. Its principles shaped the American founding — Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document, from its appeal to the laws of nature and nature's God to its assertion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that the people have the right to alter or abolish governments that become destructive of their ends. The French Revolutionaries, too, drew on Locke's language of natural rights and popular sovereignty in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The influence of the Two Treatises extends far beyond the revolutionary era. Locke's theory of natural rights became the foundation of the modern human rights tradition, codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the constitutional traditions of liberal democracies around the world. His theory of consent underpins the democratic principle that government must be accountable to the governed. His theory of property, though contested, remains a touchstone in debates about economic justice, intellectual property, and the moral foundations of capitalism. And his defense of the right of revolution continues to inspire movements for political change from the eighteenth century to the present.

The Two Treatises has also been the subject of significant critical scrutiny. Locke's involvement in the slave trade and the colonial project has led scholars to question the universality of his commitment to natural rights. His theory of property has been criticized for justifying the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and his account of tacit consent has been challenged as too weak a foundation for political obligation. Karl Marx argued that Locke's property theory was essentially an apology for capitalist accumulation, and contemporary theorists have questioned whether Lockean liberalism can adequately address the structural inequalities that characterize modern capitalist societies.

These criticisms do not diminish the importance of the Two Treatises. They demonstrate its continuing power to provoke, to challenge, and to shape the terms of political debate. Few works of political philosophy have had such a lasting impact on the way we think about the relationship between the individual and the state, the foundations of political authority, and the conditions under which power becomes illegitimate. For those wrestling with the purpose of political life and the deepest life questions about the just organization of society, Locke's Two Treatises remains an indispensable starting point — not because it provides final answers, but because it asks the right questions with a clarity and urgency that have not diminished in over three hundred years.