Two Treatises of Government

Quick Facts

• Author: John Locke
• First published: 1689, often dated 1690
• Full shape: two connected treatises, not one single essay
• First Treatise: attacks patriarchal absolutism, especially the claim that kings inherit Adam's fatherly authority
• Second Treatise: explains natural rights, property, consent, limited government, and resistance to tyranny
• Main tradition: Liberalism, with roots in Natural Law Theory
• Core claim: political power is legitimate only when it protects people's rights and rests on their consent

The Problem

Locke is trying to answer a direct political question: why should anyone obey a government?

One answer in his time said that kings rule by divine right. On that view, God gave Adam authority over his family, that authority passed down to later fathers and kings, and ordinary people were born naturally subject to royal power. Locke thinks this makes political rule look like an oversized family, with the king as father and subjects as children.

The First Treatise attacks that answer. Locke argues that no actual king can prove a special inherited right from Adam, and that fatherly care over children is not the same thing as political rule over adults. Parents raise children until they can use reason. A king claims power over grown people, property, punishment, law, and war. Those are different kinds of authority.

The Second Treatise gives Locke's positive answer. Government is not natural ownership of people by rulers. It is a tool created by free and equal persons to protect life, liberty, and property better than they can protect them alone.

In One Minute

Two Treatises of Government says that people are not born as the property of kings. They are naturally free and equal, under a moral law that forbids them from destroying or enslaving one another. They have natural rights: basic claims to life, liberty, and property that do not come from a king's permission.

Locke does not think the state of nature is automatically a war of everyone against everyone. It can have moral rules. But it is insecure because each person has to judge and enforce the law of nature for himself. People therefore form political society by consent. They give government authority to make known laws, judge disputes, and punish violations.

That authority is limited. Government is a trust, meaning a power held for someone else's benefit. If rulers attack the people's rights, rule without law, seize property, or try to make themselves absolute, they break the trust. Then the people may resist and replace them.

The Main Argument

Locke's argument begins with equality. No person is born with natural political authority over another adult. If someone claims a right to rule, he must show where that right came from.

Patriarchal absolutism fails that test. A father has authority over young children because children need care and education before they can act responsibly. That does not create a permanent right to command adult children, and it does not give one family a right to command a whole country. Political power cannot be explained as inherited fatherhood.

Locke then imagines the state of nature. This means the condition people are in before they have a common government. It is not a jungle with no morality. People are governed by natural law, which means a moral rule knowable by reason. Since humans are equal creatures of God, no one may treat another person's life, freedom, or goods as disposable.

The state of nature still has serious problems. If someone steals your horse, you may be too angry to judge fairly. If you are weak, you may not be able to enforce your rights. If everyone is judge in his own case, punishment becomes unreliable. Government is created to fix these "inconveniences": unclear law, biased judgment, and weak enforcement.

People leave the state of nature by consent. Consent means agreeing to join a political community and accept its common rules. Once a community exists, the majority can decide ordinary political questions, because a group cannot act if every person has a permanent veto.

The point of the community is the preservation of property. Locke often uses "property" broadly. It includes life, liberty, and estate, not only land or money. Government exists to protect people from murder, slavery, theft, and arbitrary power.

Locke's theory of property is famous because it explains private ownership before government. The earth is originally given for human use in common. A person makes part of it his own by labor. If you pick apples, cultivate a field, or build a table from wood, your work joins something of yours to the material. That gives you a claim against others taking it.

This is not meant to justify taking everything. Locke says appropriation is limited by spoilage and by the requirement to leave enough and as good for others. If you gather more fruit than you can use and it rots, you have wasted what others could have used. Money changes the situation because coins do not rot and people consent to use them. That lets wealth accumulate on a much larger scale, which later critics see as one of the most contested parts of Locke's argument.

The government that results is limited government. The legislature is supreme in making laws, but it is not absolute. It must govern by standing laws, serve the public good, protect property, and not take people's goods without consent through the community's representatives. Executive power applies the law. Prerogative is emergency discretion, but even that exists for public good, not personal rule.

The final step is resistance. If rulers use political power to destroy the rights it was created to protect, they put themselves into a state of war with the people. The people are not rebelling against lawful government; Locke says the rulers have dissolved lawful government by betraying its purpose.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Natural rights: rights people have before any particular government. For Locke, these include life, liberty, and property. A law against murder protects a right people already have; it does not invent the right from nothing.
• State of nature: life without a common political authority. If two neighbors have no court above them, each must defend his own rights. That can work when people are reasonable, but it becomes dangerous when they disagree or one is stronger.
• Natural law: the moral rule that reason can recognize. Locke thinks reason teaches that equal human beings may not casually harm, enslave, or destroy one another.
• Property by labor: the idea that work can create a private claim from common materials. Picking fruit, plowing land, or making a tool turns unused material into something connected to the worker's effort.
• Consent: the source of legitimate political authority. Express consent is open agreement, such as formally joining a political society. Tacit consent is implied acceptance, such as enjoying land and legal protection within a community.
• Limited government: government with a job description. It may make and enforce law for the public good. It may not rule as if citizens and their goods belong to the ruler.
• Fiduciary trust: power held for another's benefit. A trustee managing an inheritance must serve the beneficiary, not himself. Locke treats government in a similar way: rulers hold power for the people's safety and rights.
• Right of resistance: the right to oppose rulers who become tyrants. If a ruler seizes property, cancels law, or tries to reduce citizens to dependence, Locke thinks resistance can be justified.

Why It Matters

Two Treatises became one of the classic statements of modern constitutional politics. It gives a clear defense of rights, consent, representative lawmaking, religiously grounded natural law, property, and resistance to tyranny.

It matters for Liberalism because it treats the person as prior to the state in an important sense. Government does not own citizens. It must justify itself by protecting their rights. That does not make Locke a modern democrat in every respect, but it does make him central to later arguments for constitutional limits, civil liberty, and government by consent.

It also matters because it gives later politics a language of justified revolution. The people may replace a government that breaks its trust. That idea helped shape later debates around the Glorious Revolution, American constitutional thought, and modern arguments about whether rights set limits on political power.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Locke's immediate opponent is patriarchal absolutism. The First Treatise is aimed especially at Robert Filmer's defense of monarchy by fatherly and biblical inheritance.

Thomas Hobbes is the major contrast in the background. In Leviathan, Hobbes gives much stronger power to the sovereign because he thinks peace requires an undivided authority. Locke also wants peace, but he thinks a ruler who attacks rights becomes part of the problem government was meant to solve.

Later liberals used Locke as a founding voice for rights, consent, limited government, and constitutional resistance. Revolutionaries and constitutional writers found his language useful because it made opposition to tyranny sound like defense of law, not mere disorder.

Critics push on several points. Some say tacit consent is too weak: merely living somewhere may not prove real agreement. Some argue that Locke's property theory turns common resources into private wealth too easily, especially once money allows unlimited accumulation. Marxist and socialist critics often read Locke as a defender of emerging capitalism. Other critics focus on colonial uses of his labor theory, since the claim that land is "unused" can be used to ignore existing peoples and ways of using land.

The work remains powerful because it is both simple and unstable. It says government must protect rights, but people still argue over which rights count, what consent requires, how unequal property can become, and when resistance is justified.

Related Pages

• John Locke
• Liberalism
• Leviathan
• Natural Law Theory
• Thomas Hobbes