Second Treatise of Government: Deep Review

Second Treatise of Government: 30-Minute Deep Review John Locke ## 1. The Problem This Book Is Trying To Solve Welcome to Emma’s Library. This is an original thirty-minute deep review of John Locke’s *Second Treatise of Government*, first published anonymously in late 1689. This is not a direct reading of the source text, but an academic and contextual guide designed to help you navigate its complex arguments, historical background, and enduring legacy. To understand the *Second Treatise of Government*, we must first understand the intellectual and political crisis that threatened to tear seventeenth-century England apart. Locke was writing in an era of profound instability, marked by civil war, regicide, religious conflict, and the constant threat of arbitrary monarchical rule. The fundamental question of the age was simple yet existential: What makes political authority legitimate? For centuries, the prevailing answer in Europe had been the divine right of kings. This doctrine asserted that monarchs derived their authority directly from God, making them unaccountable to any earthly power, including parliaments, courts, or the common people. In the decades leading up to the publication of Locke’s work, this view was most famously and aggressively articulated by Sir Robert Filmer in his book *Patriarcha*. Filmer argued that royal authority was absolute and paternal, inherited directly from Adam, whom God had supposedly granted dominion over the entire earth. According to Filmer, subjects were not born free; they were born in absolute subjection to their sovereign, just as children were born subject to their fathers. To rebel against a king was not merely a political crime; it was a sin against God. Locke saw this doctrine as a recipe for slavery. His primary goal in writing what would become the *Two Treatises of Government* was to systematically demolish Filmer’s arguments and construct an entirely new foundation for political legitimacy. While the *First Treatise* is a dense, line-by-line biblical refutation of Filmer’s patriarchal theory, the *Second Treatise* is Locke’s constructive project. In it, he seeks to prove that political power is not divinely ordained to a single ruler, nor is it based on the natural subordination of children to parents. Instead, Locke sets out to show that legitimate political power is artificial, created by free and equal human beings to serve a specific, limited purpose. The problem he is trying to solve is how to justify a government that can maintain order and protect its citizens without degenerating into a tyranny that violates the very rights it was established to protect. He must find a way to balance the need for social order with the preservation of individual liberty, providing a coherent theoretical justification for when a people may rightfully resist, alter, or overthrow their rulers. ## 2. The Historical and Intellectual Context of 1689 Although the title page of the *Two Treatises of Government* bears the date 1689, modern scholarship has revealed that the text was largely composed nearly a decade earlier, during the turbulent years of the Exclusion Crisis between 1679 and 1681. This distinction is crucial for understanding the radical nature of Locke’s project. For a long time, it was believed that Locke wrote the book simply as a post-hoc justification for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw the Catholic King James II flee the country and the Protestant William of Orange ascend the throne. In reality, Locke was writing not to justify a revolution that had already happened, but to prepare the intellectual ground for a revolution that was still being planned. During the late 1670s, Locke was deeply embedded in the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was the leader of the Whig faction, a political movement dedicated to preventing the Catholic brother of Charles II, the future James II, from inheriting the crown. The Whigs feared that a Catholic monarch would ally with France, dismantle Parliament, and impose absolute rule and religious uniformity on England. As Shaftesbury’s personal physician, advisor, and intellectual partner, Locke was at the very center of this high-stakes political conspiracy. When the Exclusion Bill failed and Charles II dissolved Parliament, the Whigs began contemplating armed resistance. This was an incredibly dangerous time to write about political theory. In 1683, Locke’s close…

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