- Length
- 464 pagesLaslett, Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge, student ed. 1988
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Two Treatises of Government
The book that made consent the ground of political authority and property a natural right prior to government, published anonymously by a man who denied writing it for fifteen years. Its argument for a right of resistance is the part that mattered most and the part he was most careful not to be caught with.
- Date
- 1689
- Author
- John Locke
- Region
- England and the Dutch Republic
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 38 years
Published anonymously and denied by its author for the rest of his life; acknowledged only in his will.
What the book says
Two works, of which almost everyone reads only the second. The first is a line-by-line demolition of Robert Filmer's argument that kings inherit their authority from Adam's dominion over his children, and it is thorough to the point of tedium; its purpose is to clear away the claim that political power is a species of fatherly power. The second builds the alternative. In the state of nature people are free and equal, but not lawless: reason teaches that nobody ought to harm another in life, health, liberty or possessions, and each may enforce this. Property arises before government, because a person owns their own body and therefore the labour of it, so that mixing labour with something previously common makes it theirs - subject to leaving enough and as good for others and to not letting it spoil. What is missing in that condition is not law but impartial enforcement, so people consent to a government to supply it. Since they entrust rather than surrender their rights, the government holds power in trust; and a government that acts against the trust - taking property without consent, ruling arbitrarily - has dissolved itself, and the people may resist.
What it argues
That government exists to secure rights people already have, and holds its power on trust. Everything follows from the state of nature being moral rather than empty: there is a law of nature, discoverable by reason, and it binds before any state exists. Property is the pivot. Because each person owns themselves, they own their labour, and mixing it with unowned things makes those things theirs - which means property is not created by the state and cannot be taken by it without consent. Government is instituted to remedy what the natural condition lacks, which is an impartial judge, and its powers are limited to that purpose. Exceeding them dissolves the trust, and the people, who never gave up the right to preserve themselves, may act.
What it answered
Leviathan 1651Thomas Hobbes
Filmer explicitly and Hobbes structurally. Against Filmer the argument is genealogical: if authority descends from Adam, then somebody today is the rightful heir of the world, and nobody can say who, so the doctrine cannot be applied even if it were true. Against Hobbes the argument is about what the alternative to absolutism is. Hobbes had said the choice is unlimited sovereignty or the war of all against all; Locke's whole construction is designed to show a third thing - a state of nature with law in it, and therefore a government that can be limited without collapsing.
What answered it
Filmer's defenders, briefly. Hume attacked the contract as bad history and worse justification, pointing out that no government was ever founded that way and that tacit consent, extracted from a peasant who cannot leave the country, is not consent. Rousseau took the framework and denied that anyone may alienate their sovereignty even by agreeing to. And Marx attacked the property argument at its root, arguing that the labour theory of appropriation in a world where land is already owned justifies whatever the existing distribution happens to be.
How it argues
By construction from a starting condition, like Hobbes, but with more attention to what people would actually consent to. Locke's prose is plain to the point of understatement and the argument advances by patient distinctions - between paternal, political and despotic power, between dissolving a government and dissolving a society, between express and tacit consent. The First Treatise argues quite differently, by exegesis, since Filmer's case is scriptural and had to be met on its ground.
The moment
The exclusion crisis and its aftermath. Locke was in the household of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was trying to exclude a Catholic heir from the throne and was implicated in plots to that end; Shaftesbury fled to Holland and died there, and Locke followed into exile, returning only after James II had been driven out in 1688. The book appeared the following year without his name, and he denied authorship to the end - which was prudent, since the argument justifies removing a king rather than merely welcoming his replacement.
How it travelled
Into constitutions. The Two Treatises supplied the American revolutionaries with their vocabulary - life, liberty, the consent of the governed, the right to alter or abolish - and Jefferson's phrasing follows it closely. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was the standard statement of the case for limited government, and its reputation rose and fell with liberalism's. Laslett's discovery that it was written before the revolution it was thought to justify changed the book from a rationalisation into a programme.
The strongest objection
That consent does the work and cannot bear the weight. Almost nobody has ever expressly consented to their government, so Locke needs tacit consent - which he grounds in enjoying the benefits of a territory, including merely travelling on its roads. Hume's reply is decisive on its own terms: a man who was born in a country, speaks only its language and cannot afford passage out has not consented by staying, any more than a sailor consents to a captain by not jumping overboard. The related objection concerns property: the proviso requiring enough and as good left for others is satisfied nowhere on earth, and Locke's move through the invention of money to justify unlimited accumulation is the least examined step in the book.
Why read it
The Second Treatise, and specifically the chapters on the state of nature, on property and on the dissolution of government. The First is for specialists. It is short, plain and startlingly readable for a seventeenth-century political text, and the property chapter in particular is worth reading slowly, because a great deal has been built on about ten pages.
- First printed
- 1689
- First in English
- 1689
- Digitised
- Yes
Laslett's edition of 1960 established the earlier composition date from Locke's papers and reordered the scholarly understanding of the book; every edition since works from it.
Written in English. All editions are public domain.
Where it stands
Live. Locke is the reference point for rights-based political theory, the labour theory of appropriation is argued about in every discussion of property, and the question of what makes political authority legitimate is still put largely in his terms - including by people whose answer is that nothing does.
The passage
Every man has a property in his own person
Second Treatise, chapter V, section 27. Public domain, and Locke's own words.
Contested
The composition date was settled by Laslett's work on Locke's papers but the implications are still being drawn out, since a book written to justify resistance reads differently from one written to celebrate a settlement. Whether Locke's theory of property justifies or limits inequality is argued in both directions with textual support. His involvement in colonial administration and the relation between the labour theory of appropriation and the dispossession of peoples held not to be improving the land is a substantial and uncomfortable line of recent scholarship. And why he denied authorship so persistently is not fully explained.