John Locke's Two Treatises of Government

Two Treatises of Government is John Locke's case for government by consent. It went on sale in London late in 1689, from Awnsham Churchill's shop at the sign of the Black Swan in Ave Maria Lane, with no author's name and the year 1690 on its title page. The first treatise takes apart Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which said that kings inherit absolute power from Adam, the first father, so that every subject is born unfree. The second gives Locke's own answer. Before there is any government, people live in a 'state of nature', free and equal under a law of nature that forbids anyone to harm another's life, health, liberty or possessions. Each person owns himself, and by mixing his labour with land or its fruits he makes them his property. People agree to form a society and let its majority set up a government, to protect what Locke calls their 'lives, liberties and estates'. Rulers hold their power on trust: a government that takes people's property without their consent, or tries to make them slaves, has broken that trust, and the people may resist it and set up another. Who decides when that has happened? 'The people shall be judge.'

Locke wrote most of it ten years earlier, in a far more dangerous time. An Oxford scholar and physician, he had lived since 1667 in the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, who became the leader of the Whig opposition. From 1679 Shaftesbury led the campaign to bar King Charles II's Catholic brother James from the throne, and supporters of the Crown brought out Filmer's Patriarcha, written decades before and printed for the first time in 1680. By the reconstruction of the historian Peter Laslett, Locke drafted the Second Treatise in the winter of 1679-80, added the First early in 1680 and went on revising both until 1683; others, following Richard Ashcraft, date it to 1680-82 and read it as a call to armed resistance. The Exclusion Bill failed. Shaftesbury was arrested, fled abroad and died in Amsterdam in January 1683, and after the Rye House Plot against the King and his brother came to light that summer, Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were executed, Sidney partly on the evidence of his unpublished papers defending the right to resist. In September 1683 Locke slipped away to Holland.

He stayed in exile for more than five years: in Amsterdam, where he lived for a time under a false name while England tried to have him handed over, and then in Rotterdam, in the circle of the English Quaker merchant Benjamin Furly. There he finished his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and wrote a letter in Latin on religious toleration. When William of Orange landed in England in November 1688 and James II fled, Locke crossed in February 1689 with the party escorting William's wife, Princess Mary, and on 13 February Parliament offered the two of them the crown together with a Declaration of Rights. Over the spring and summer Locke revised his old manuscript and wrote a preface saying that the book should establish the throne of 'our great restorer, our present King William' and his title 'in the consent of the people'; the middle part, more than half of the whole, had been lost. The official licenser passed it for printing on 23 August. It came out the same autumn as his Letter Concerning Toleration, also anonymous and from the same bookseller, and just before the Essay, the only one of the three to bear his name. Locke never admitted in public that he had written the Treatises. He did so only in a codicil to his will in 1704, the year he died, listing it among the anonymous books he gave to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The revolution itself spoke more cautiously than Locke: Parliament called James's flight an abdication, not a broken contract. But by barring Catholics from the throne and binding the new rulers to a Bill of Rights, the settlement made every king's power conditional, which Britannica calls a triumph for the Whig views Locke had argued for, and over the next century his book became the classic statement of them. Its strongest echo came in America. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 says that people have unalienable rights, that governments get 'their just powers from the consent of the governed', and that a people may alter or abolish a government that destroys those rights: Locke's argument, put into a few lines by Thomas Jefferson. Britannica traces to Locke the broad outline of the United States Constitution as well, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.

Natural rights, government by consent, limited power divided between a legislature and an executive: Locke's vocabulary is now the everyday language of constitutions and of human rights, so familiar that, as the Yale political philosopher Steven Smith puts it, readers feel he is only saying what they always thought. The book is also argued over. Scholars point out that its theory of property gave Native Americans a right to the game they caught but not to the land they hunted on, which Locke treated as empty and open to whoever would farm it, and some tie the chapter on property to Locke's work for the proprietors of the Carolina colony, whose constitutions he helped to draft. Historians still disagree, too, about whether it was the defence of a revolution that had already happened or, as Laslett and Richard Ashcraft argued, a call for one that had not.