Locke's Second Treatise for Seekers

Dear reader — John Locke wrote the Second Treatise of Government in the wake of England's crises of the 1680s, when Parliament and the Crown were fighting over who ruled. It came out anonymously in 1689 and 1690. His argument is simple enough to fit on an index card, and it fills the Declaration of Independence: government exists to protect people's lives, liberties and property, it gets its authority from their consent, and when it betrays that trust the people can change it.

It also has uncomfortable parts. Locke's own life and writing connect to slavery and colonial land, and a fair guide shows those too.

Free And Equal By Nature

Locke was answering Sir Robert Filmer, who argued in Patriarcha that kings ruled by a right inherited from Adam and that people were born subject. The First Treatise is the direct reply. In the Second, Locke starts from the opposite place: a "state of nature" where people are free and equal, bound by a law of nature that reason can discover.

"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."

That starting point does a lot of work. If nobody is born with a right to rule anyone else, then government has to be justified, and the justification has to come from the people being governed. The idea that people have rights that exist before government is the foundation of most modern liberal democracy. It's still argued over: some deny there's a natural law, some think it leaves out obligations to the community, and some ask whose reason counts.

Property

"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his."

If the earth was given to everyone in common, how does one person end up owning part of it? Locke's answer is labor. Whoever mixes his work with a piece of nature makes it his. Then he sets two limits: don't take more than you can use before it spoils, and leave "enough and as good" for others. Money changes the picture, he says, because it lets value be stored without spoiling.

This is one of the most influential ideas in political philosophy, and people on opposite sides cite it. One reading says strong property rights come first: you own your body and labor, so what you earn is yours, and a ruler who takes property without consent breaks the trust that justifies government. The other says property comes with limits and duties: Locke insists the earth was given to all, that nobody may waste what they take, and in the First Treatise he says those in extreme need have a claim on the surplus of the rich. Taken seriously, those limits justify taxes and public provision. Scholars like C. B. Macpherson, Jeremy Waldron and Robert Nozick have fought about which reading is right. I'll leave that fight where it is.

Consent

"Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent."

If people are free and equal, what gives anyone the right to govern? Agreement. People give up some natural freedom, mostly the power to judge and punish in their own cases, to a government in exchange for protecting their lives, liberties and estates. That purpose limits the government: it holds power as a trust.

Today that sounds obvious, and it's the language of the Declaration. How real the consent is remains disputed. Locke allows "tacit consent," which he says is given by anyone who uses the roads and lives under the laws. David Hume later called that a stretch.

When The Trust Breaks

"Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience."

If government is a trust, what happens when the trustee betrays it? Locke says the people keep a supreme power to remove or alter the legislature, and that a government attacking their rights puts itself in a state of war with them. He also says it's a last resort, that people tolerate long abuses before they rise, and that the final recourse is an "appeal to heaven." That's the Declaration's "long train of abuses."

The Uncomfortable Parts

Locke's very first line in the First Treatise condemns slavery: "Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man... that it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it."

But as secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury he was involved with the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave every free man "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves," and he came to hold shares in the slave-trading Royal African Company, which he later sold. Scholars dispute whether those shares were his own investment or payment for his work. In the Second Treatise he allows slavery as a result of a just war and treats land used by Native peoples in America as largely unimproved and open to settlers. Scholars dispute how much he personally shaped the Carolina document: David Armitage argues he was closely involved, and James Farr reads the evidence differently.

How should that change how we read him? One answer says it undercuts the theory: a philosophy of universal freedom whose author helped write a charter protecting slaveholders' absolute power shows how easily the language of rights served the powerful. The other says it shows the gap the theory exposes: the principle that all are born free and equal is exactly what abolitionists later used against slavery, and a philosophy isn't refuted by its author's failures. Frederick Douglass and Lincoln didn't discard "all men are created equal" because Jefferson owned slaves. They held the country to the principle.

How Much Did The Founders Read Him?

Textbooks often call Locke the father of the American Revolution. That's a simplification. Political scientist Donald Lutz counted citations in American political writing from 1760 to 1805 and found the Bible cited more than any other source, with Montesquieu and Blackstone cited more often than Locke. The founders drew on a mix of sources: the Bible, Roman writers, English common law, the Scottish Enlightenment.

So two myths in opposite directions: that the Declaration is just Locke copied out (it shares his ideas but swaps "estates" for "the pursuit of Happiness" and has other influences), and that Locke had little to do with the founding (he's cited and echoed throughout the period, even if not the only or biggest source). Historians like Louis Hartz, Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock disagree about how central he was. One major source among several is the honest picture.

Where To Start

Read chapter II (the state of nature), chapter V (property) and chapter XIX (dissolution of government). That's the skeleton. Then read the Declaration's second paragraph and see how much of Locke is in it.