John Locke: Second Treatise on Civil Government

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The excerpts from the Second Treatise on Civil Government are taken from four chapters: Chapter II, “Of the State of Nature”; Chapter III, “Of the State of War”; Chapter IV, “Of Slavery”; and Chapter V, “Of Property.” These excerpts deal with fundamental questions about government, including the origin of government and what makes the authority of government legitimate.

Chapter II: “Of the State of Nature”

Locke's Second Treatise argues that governments originated from a primal social contract. Locke, like other social contract theorists, posited a fictive political environment called the “state of nature,” a kind of theoretical state in which people enjoy absolute freedom, without the constraints of society and government. He begins with the premise that originally people lived in a primitive state of nature without any government and in accordance with the “law of nature.” In support of his view he quotes Richard Hooker, an Anglican theologian and the author of the multivolume work Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, first published in the 1590s. The essence of Hooker's view, according to Locke, is that equality is “the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men.” Freedom, however, does not mean unfettered license—that is, license for people to do wrong or to do whatever they want. While people live in a state of nature, they are obligated to follow the law of nature, which dictates that a person may not “take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.” Still, in the state of nature some people violate the natural rights of others. Thus, to protect their rights, people join together to create government. This is accomplished by means of a “social contract” by which each person agrees to give up certain rights, such as the right to exact vengeance, in order to better protect the more fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property.

Much of the discussion in this chapter is given over to such matters as vengeance, criminals, and violations of natural law. Locke argues that if there is no means of enforcing natural law, then people can violate it at will. In a pure state of nature, an individual who has been harmed by another possesses a natural right to seek retribution. In so doing, that person achieves power over another, and this power is essentially the beginnings of government. The person who has harmed another has broken the tie (“tye,” as Locke spells it) that binds people to one another. In breaking the tie, the offender has harmed not just an individual but, indeed, the entire human species. The social contract creates a government that is assigned the duty of protecting natural rights. Laws are made legitimate by the fact that the government is created by the will of the people; by consenting to the social contract, each person is obeying himself or herself, because the law is really each person's will. This is the case even if someone has not expressly agreed to the social contract. By staying within a society, a person tacitly accepts the terms of the social contract. The social contract then makes government legitimate; its laws are morally binding because they are the laws created by personal consent of the governed.

Locke goes into some detail in discussing particular instances. He argues that a national government does not have jurisdiction over aliens. More important, he takes up the issues of punishment, deterrence of crime, and retribution. Again, in a state of nature, each person is the executor of his or her right to self-preservation and therefore of the right to seek retribution against a criminal. The problem, of course, noted in section 13, is that in the state of nature, every person is, in effect, prosecutor, judge, jury, and potential executioner with respect to his or her own concerns and grievances. Nevertheless, a person in a state of nature at least has the right to seek justice when the laws of nature have been violated—and as a check, that person's justice is then subject to the sense of justice of “the rest of mankind” and to potential further retribution. A larger problem is that a king or prince as head of a government, “commanding a multitude,” can likewise function as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, but without any means of retribution available to the masses in the case of royal injustice. The paradox for Locke is that government, while restraining vengeance and retribution, can be yet another form of subjecting people to the potentially unjust will of another.

Chapter III: “Of the State of War”

Locke begins this chapter by defining war—which in this discussion is considered more in the context of conflict between individuals—as a state of “enmity and destruction” that comes about when one person makes a premeditated assault on another's life. But a crucial part of the law of self-preservation is that one person may take another's life in self-defense, since any aggression on the part of one person challenges the victim's essential freedom. In the author's words, “I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred.” From this premise Locke argues that one can kill a thief because any attack on a person's property is an attack on his or her freedom. Further, anyone who attempts to put himself in a position of absolute power over another is essentially making war—clearly an argument against absolute monarchies and the presumed divine right of monarchs to rule.

Locke proceeds by delineating how the state of war and the state of nature are not the same. In the state of nature, people live together and are governed by reason. They have no common superiors in the form of persons. War, on the other hand, is a state in which people exert force on others. Facing force or the threat of force, a person under attack has the right to fight back—to make war. The defining characteristic of the state of nature, Locke argues, is the lack of a common judge or authority. By reason rather than through any personal authority, then, force directed against a person is considered a violation of the natural law that prevails in the state of nature and thus forms a sufficient basis for waging war.

War, however, can take place both in the state of nature and in society. The difference between the two, noted in section 19, has to do with the conclusion of the conflict. In the state of nature, war does not come to an end unless the aggressor makes peace and offers reparations for any damage done. Until that time comes, the injured party has the right to try to destroy his adversary. In society, on the other hand, both the aggressor and the victim can appeal to authority to resolve the conflict. A chief problem that can occur is that the authorities can fail to act with justice. When such is the case, the state of war will persist, for “wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law” (section 20).

Again, such passages can be viewed as offering justification not only for the regicide of 1649 but also for the Glorious Revolution. Other writers, such as Robert Filmer (whose arguments are addressed by Locke primarily in the First Treatise) and Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan) had argued that monarchs held supreme authority; in Filmer's view, they have a divine right to rule, while in Hobbes's view, supreme monarchs are necessary to protect people from their own baseness and destructiveness. The essence of Locke's argument is that people have the same right to oppose unjust leadership as they do to oppose attacks on their persons or property in a state of nature. Locke concludes the discussion by maintaining that people enter into society principally to avoid the state of war, for the existence of authority increases stability and personal security and reduces the need for war.

Chapter IV: “Of Slavery”

This chapter does not deal with slavery as the word is traditionally understood. Rather, it deals more generally with the concept of one person having absolute power over another. Thus, a person under a despotic government is just as much a slave as someone engaged in forced labor for another. Locke states his fundamental view in the chapter's opening sentence: “The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.” He goes on to distinguish natural liberty from social liberty. Natural liberty is a state in which one is guided by the law of nature; social liberty is a state in which people have the right to be subject to no legislative power other than that created by the consent of the governed. A commonwealth is established only “by consent.” The commonwealth's authorities can act only “according to the trust” put in them.

Locke's view is that freedom from power that is absolute or arbitrary is fundamental—so much so that a person cannot give it up, even if one wanted to do so. Further, slavery represents an extension of the state of war discussed in Chapter III. In section 24, Locke cites the example of the Jews in the Old Testament book of Exodus, who sold themselves not into slavery but into drudgery, for their conquerors did not have absolute power over them.

Chapter V: “Of Property”

A central portion of the Second Treatise is Locke's discussion of property. He begins with the notion that both the Bible and natural reason sanction the right of people to use the earth for their survival and comfort. The important question is that if the earth exists for humankind in general, how does one acquire individual property? Locke's answer is to begin by noting that one's body is property. But a person owns not only the physical object of one's body but also the labor one performs with that body. Labor, then, is a type of property, so when people add their labor to some item, they now own the item (or at least a share of the item). Locke provides a simple example in section 28: An apple on a tree exists for the benefit of humankind. However, when the apple is picked, a person has added labor to the apple, and the apple now belongs to the person. A person can do this without obtaining the consent of humankind.

Locke argues, however, that this type of economic activity has boundaries. A person can fairly acquire only as much goods as he or she can reasonably use. If a person picks more apples than needed, the surplus will rot and go to waste. Similarly, in the case of land, a person is entitled only to as much land as he or she can reasonably use—to build a house on, for example, or to farm. In summary, what determines the value of a commodity is the labor invested in it, and it is labor that people use to make their world inhabitable.