Summary
Locke’s two most famous political essays are collected here. In the first, he debates the leading theory of monarchical legitimacy. In the second, he casts his own vision of what political legitimacy looks like.
First Treatise (against hereditary monarchy)
Locke’s first treatise is in response to a popular book written by Robert Filmer titled Patriarcha which provides arguments supporting the divine rights of kings. As a modern reader, it is hard not to hear the arguments put forward by Filmer as anything other than attempts to fabricate defenses for an existing system of governance. The basic line of reasoning goes something like God granted Adam dominion over all the world and as such created the blueprint for how governments should be structured. There is then some confused argumentation about how children are born under the dominion of their parents and the way dominion is inherited like property to the first born. In Filmer’s defense, I am hearing these arguments from Locke who clearly thinks they are even more confused than me. Reading argumentation about something that society has largely moved past is not very interesting.
Second Treatise (state of nature, law of nature, legitimate government)
Locke does get into much more interesting territory when laying out his own novel theory of where governments get their legitimacy. Before describing how governments should function it was important to Locke to define the condition of individuals who are not under any government. Locke called this condition a “State of Nature”, or just the natural state of humans. To Locke, this is a condition of perfect equality, no human has dominion over another. All relations are defined by rationality and subordination to the natural laws of God and nature, like thou shalt not steal or kill etc. While no one has any political authority in this state over another, there is still the right to administer punishment when a natural law is broken. When disputes are not resolved through rationality and force is employed the relationship falls from a state of nature to that of a state of war. This is above all the state most to be avoided, for having cast off rationality, the other becomes no better than a predatory animal that must be destroyed. It is to avoid the common occurrence of the state of war that people organize governments to arbitrate disputes.
To Locke, the principal aim of a government is the protection of private property. Locke’s definition of property, which he defines as that which is properly one’s own, here includes not only one’s possessions but also one’s liberty, and life. What made Locke’s theory politically radical for his time is that he argued if a government didn’t protect its citizen’s liberty and possessions it had no legitimacy and its subjects had a moral right to overthrow it. It is this contractual nature of government which justified his earlier work, where Locke went through such pains to disprove divine mandate; to Locke the alternative to divine mandate was a social contract, one which could be invalidated by monarch as easily as by subjects.
Locke continues to define what his version of the social contract looks like. While not demanding democratic governance per se, consent played a major role in Locke’s prescription of what a legitimate government actually looks like. He goes so far as to argue that without the active or tacit consent of the individual to be governed, the individual would be considered in a state of nature.
This provides a framework for Locke’s ‘Right of Revolution’ which would be employed as justification by America’s founding fathers. Yet allowing for revolution is a dangerous thing to do. Locke recognizes this and argues that all the constraints that apply to existing governments must also constrain revolutions. That is, they must represent the will of the majority and work to secure personal liberty and property. If a revolution does spring up without popular consent, a military coup for example, would not be legitimate in Locke’s eyes. He in fact argues that, by the same logic, foreign conquest of a nation grants no right of possession to the invaders as it is done without the consent of the residents and thus has no path to legitimacy.
Locke proceeds to then outline some structural elements of the government that would help to preserve its stability and accountability to the governed. These include things such as separating the legislative and executive branches and acknowledging the legislative branch as supreme to maintain its authority to lawfully remove the head of the executive if grounds for removal are found. With each new piece Locke adds, further complications arise. For example, if it is up to the legislative to decide what actions are lawful for the executive to take, what should the executive do in times of crisis where quick decisions are required? Locke adds the concept of prerogative to allow the executive some leeway to take decisive action. This of course leads to more questions of how to constrain the leader’s prerogative within proper bounds as to not create a monarch in crisis and on and on.
Thoughts
This was good and gave me a lot to think through. Locke’s influence in Britain at the time of writing this may have been small, but the second treatise and the “Right of Revolution” became a foundational principle for the founding fathers, as was the idea of governments representing the governed. Instead of recapitulating all the points of agreement I would rather focus on the things that left me questioning. The giant that lives in the shadows of this text is Thomas Hobbes. It is hard to overstate how ever present and threatening of a character Hobbes was in political theory at the time. He was known as the Monster of Malmesbury, this was mostly because Hobbes unapologetically described the world and God himself in purely materialistic terms. This resulted in Hobbes being labeled an atheist and his books being banned. It was dangerous to be caught explicitly dealing with Hobbes’ arguments because of guilt by association. Yet, his ideas were so hard to refute that much of political theory that emerged after Hobbes’ Leviathan were attempts to answer and refute the arguments therein. Locke never mentions Hobbes by name, but his ideas are scattered throughout the text. After all, the term ‘State of Nature’ was popularized by Hobbes and one that Locke redefines according to his own design. This does put Locke in danger though, as if he was branded with the label of atheist, his ideas could be easily dismissed. This may in part explain the tightrope he walks, going through many pains to separate his ideas from Hobbes while quietly adopting Hobbes’ revolutionary lens of explaining political authority through human action rather than divine appointment. This is not to say that there aren’t fundamental differences between the two thinkers, but it is said to highlight the pressures of the time.
One of the main disagreements between Hobbes and Locke was in their definitions of state of nature, to Hobbes, the state of nature was famously ’nasty, brutish and short’, to Locke this was a description of the state of war, the state of nature was a level that existed above the state of war. This undercuts Hobbes’ central justification for submitting to a ruler no matter how tyrannical. To Hobbes any state was preferable to that of a state of nature. Locke rejects this, arguing that life underneath a tyrannical king is in fact no different than Hobbes’ state of nature. This is captured by Locke’s now famous quote:
This is to think, that men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.
The other major disagreement Locke and Hobbes had was that to Hobbes, definitionally, whatever a ruler did was just. Locke argued that the ruler was only a ruler by consent of the governed and as such could break the terms of that consent and therefore be unjust. Thus, creating the foundation of the right of rebellion.
As for my own perspective, I am categorically aligned with Hobbes and prescriptively aligned with Locke. Locke attempts to compress several layers of analysis into a single coherent view. He slides between legal validity, political legitimacy, and moral evaluation without acknowledging that each of these lenses draw boundaries in different ways. For example, when Hobbes argues that anything an absolute ruler does is just, this sounds appalling to our ears, but when looked at through the lens of legal validity it is almost a tautology. If the absolute ruler writes a law that says “The leader can do no wrong” then within that framework the ruler cannot be labeled a criminal or unjust according to its own logic. This ties into my largest critique of Locke’s concept of a right of revolution. He is making a case for overthrowing a corrupt government, but it is impossible to make a political or legal case for overthrowing a government. A government cannot enshrine the means of its own dissolution. It may provide a way to replace its leadership or alter its laws, but no government in history allows its subjects to dissolve the government. This can only be done by a revolution which is by legal definition always a crime of the highest order.
So, is a revolution ever justified? I would argue that this right can only exist in a moral realm which Locke folds into a political one. One can look upon a tyrannical government and wish for it to fall, even participate in its overthrow, but one can never expect such an act to be legally justified by the government being overthrown. As Locke would have argued himself, one can only make an Appeal to Heaven and hope that God grants the cause success.
Another issue with Locke’s prescriptions is that they are open to quite a bit of interpretations and grey areas which a nice clean absolute ruler doesn’t need to address. For example, splitting the government between legislative and executive is justified by arguing that the legislative branch shouldn’t be entrusted with executing the laws lest they make exceptions for themselves. This is fine as far as it goes, but he then goes on to declare the legislative to be the supreme authority in the government because they can replace the executive. There is a tension here in that the split between defining laws and executing them is divided cleanly between these two branches save for the single action of replacing the leader. But how are the legislatures supposed to know when they are authorized to use this exception? Similar issues occur with Locke’s concept of executive prerogative, which by its nature cannot be explicitly defined due to the inherent complexity of our world.
Even if these theoretical tensions could be resolved, history would create another that Locke couldn’t have anticipated; namely semi-permanent political parties. In Locke’s sketch of a government, the assumption was that legislature would be loyal to the legislative branch while executives would be loyal to the executive branch. These loyalties would work to keep each other’s powers in check. Political parties undercut this by creating loyalties that supersede government branches. As a result, you can end up with a legislative that is run by spineless yes men for the current executive, I will not give any current examples that come to mind, alternatively you can have an obstructive relationship between the branches where neither are interested in effective governance but instead are more invested in advancing their party’s power.
Saying all of this though, oftentimes a thinker’s greatest achievement is providing the correct terms with which to build and attack arguments. By this metric Locke was one of the West’s foremost political theorists and his categories continue to be relevant even in a world that has unfolded much differently than he would have imagined.