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 friend and fellow Whig theorist, Algernon Sidney, was executed for treason, with his unpublished manuscript on government used as the primary evidence against him. Sensing the imminent danger, Locke fled England for Holland, where he lived in exile under an assumed name for several years. It was during this period of exile and underground political organizing that Locke refined his ideas on toleration, education, and government.

When Locke finally returned to England in 1689, following the bloodless overthrow of James II, he brought his manuscripts with him. He published the *Two Treatises* anonymously, keeping his authorship a closely guarded secret until his deathbed. He did this because the ideas contained within the book were still incredibly radical. Even under the new constitutional monarchy of William and Mary, Locke’s assertion that the people held the ultimate sovereignty and had the right to overthrow a government that violated their trust was viewed with deep suspicion by the ruling elites. By examining this context, we see that Locke was not a detached, academic philosopher writing in an ivory tower. He was a political partisan, a fugitive, and a revolutionary who wrote the *Second Treatise* as a practical weapon to defend liberty against the encroaching forces of absolute monarchy.

## 3. The Central Argument: Consent and the Social Contract

The central argument of the *Second Treatise* is that legitimate political authority rests solely on the consent of the governed. Locke constructs this argument by taking his readers on a conceptual journey, starting with human beings in their original, pre-political condition and tracing the logical steps that lead them to form a state. This framework, known as the social contract theory, was not unique to Locke, but his formulation of it differed radically from his contemporaries, most notably Thomas Hobbes.

Locke begins by arguing that to understand political power, we must first understand what human beings are like before government exists. In this hypothetical "state of nature," all individuals are naturally free and equal. No one has a natural right to rule over anyone else. However, this state of perfect freedom is not a state of lawlessness. It is governed by a "law of nature," which Locke identifies with human reason. This law dictates that because all humans are equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in their life, health, liberty, or possessions.

While the state of nature is not inherently a state of war, it is highly unstable and insecure. Without a common judge to resolve disputes, every individual has the right to interpret and enforce the law of nature. If someone’s rights are violated, they are the judge, jury, and executioner in their own case. This inevitably leads to bias, passion, and cycles of revenge, turning what should be a peaceful condition into a state of violence and uncertainty. 

To escape this insecurity, Locke argues, individuals voluntarily agree to enter into a social contract. They join together to form a civil society, agreeing to give up their individual power to enforce the law of nature to a central authority. In return, this new government agrees to use its collective power to protect the natural rights of all its citizens. 

The crucial move in Locke’s argument is that this contract is not a surrender of rights, but a delegation of power. Unlike Hobbes, who argued that citizens must surrender all their rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security, Locke insists that the government is merely a trustee. The power held by the government is a fiduciary power, given to them on the condition that they use it for the public good and the preservation of property. If the government fails to fulfill this trust, the contract is broken, and the power reverts to the people, who have the right to establish a new legislative authority. Legitimate government, therefore, is always limited, always conditional, and always dependent on the ongoing consent of the citizens.

## 4. Key Concept: The State of Nature and the Law of Reason

To fully appreciate the elegance and radicalism of Locke’s theory, we must examine his conception of the state of nature in greater detail, particularly how it contrasts with the darker vision of Thomas Hobbes. In his famous work *Leviathan*, Hobbes had characterized the state of nature as a horrific, chaotic war of all against all, where life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." For Hobbes, human beings are driven entirely by self-interest and the fear of violent death, meaning that without an absolute sovereign to keep them in awe, peaceful coexistence is impossible.

Locke rejects this pessimistic view. For Locke, the state of nature is a condition of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation, which only occasionally degenerates into conflict. The reason for this relative peace is that the state of nature is not a moral vacuum. It is governed by the law of nature, which is accessible to all human beings through the use of their reason. Locke writes that reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

This law of nature is binding on all individuals, even in the absence of a government. It is rooted in the idea that human beings are the workmanship of an infinitely wise and powerful Maker, sent into the world by His order and about His business. Because we are all God’s property, we do not have the right to destroy ourselves or one another. We have a duty to preserve ourselves, and, when our own preservation does not come into competition, to preserve the rest of mankind as much as we can.

However, the state of nature has three major defects that make it unsustainable in the long run. First, it lacks an established, settled, known law, received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong. Although the law of nature is plain and intelligible to all rational creatures, people are often biased by their own interests and ignorant of its demands when applied to their specific situations. Second, the state of nature lacks a known and indifferent judge, with authority to determine all differences according to the established law. When people are judges in their own cases, passion and revenge are likely to carry them too far. Third, the state of nature often lacks the power to back and support a sentence when right, and to give it due execution. Those who commit injustices will often resist their punishment with force, making the enforcement of natural law dangerous and uncertain.

By identifying these specific defects, Locke shows that civil society is not created to rescue humanity from a state of inherent depravity, but rather to provide a more efficient, impartial, and secure way of enforcing a moral law that already exists. Government is not a radical break from nature, but a rational refinement of it.

## 5. Key Concept: The Theory of Property and the Commons

Perhaps the most famous, influential, and hotly debated section of the *Second Treatise* is Chapter Five, "Of Property." In this chapter, Locke sets out to solve a major philosophical puzzle: If God gave the earth to all mankind in common, how can any individual rightfully claim exclusive ownership of a specific piece of land or resource without the explicit consent of everyone else in the world?

Locke’s solution begins with the body. He asserts that although the earth and all inferior creatures are common to all men, yet every man has a "property" in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. From this starting point, Locke derives his famous labor theory of value. He argues that when an individual takes something out of the state that nature has provided and left it in, they mix their labor with it, and join to it something that is their own. By mixing their physical effort with a natural resource—whether by picking an apple from a tree, drawing water from a stream, or tilling a plot of land—they remove it from the common state and make it their private property.

However, Locke does not believe that individuals have an unlimited right to accumulate property. He introduces two crucial limitations, often referred to by scholars as the Lockeian provisos. The first is the spoilage limitation. Locke argues that a person may only appropriate as much as they can use to any advantage of life before it spoils. If a man gathers more apples than he can eat, and they rot in his possession, he has offended against the common law of nature and invaded his neighbor’s share, because he has wasted resources that could have sustained others. The second limitation is the sufficiency proviso. Locke states that an individual can only appropriate land or resources "at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others." One cannot claim exclusive ownership of a resource if doing so leaves others destitute.

These limitations worked well in the early stages of human history, when the world was vast and the population was small. But Locke explains that the introduction of money radically transformed this natural economy. Money is a durable, non-perishable medium of exchange—such as gold, silver, or diamonds—that people agree to value by mutual consent. Because gold and silver do not rot, an individual can accumulate an unlimited amount of them without violating the spoilage limitation. 

The introduction of money allowed for the unequal accumulation of land and wealth. Locke argues that by consenting to the use of money, human beings implicitly consented to the unequal distribution of property that naturally flows from it. This transition from a simple, subsistence-based economy to a complex, commercial society increased the frequency of disputes over property, making the establishment of a formal government even more urgent. For Locke, the primary purpose of entering into political society is the preservation of this hard-won property.

## 6. Key Concept: Consent, Trust, and the Limits of Legislative Power

Having established why human beings want to leave the state of nature, Locke turns his attention to how they construct their new political order. He emphasizes that a legitimate political society can only be founded on the explicit consent of the individuals who join it. This is a highly demanding standard, and it raises an obvious objection: If legitimate government requires consent, what about people who are born into an already existing state? They never signed a contract or took an oath of allegiance. Are they bound by the laws of the land?

To address this problem, Locke introduces his famous distinction between express and tacit consent. Express consent is a clear, formal declaration of allegiance, such as an oath or a contract, which makes an individual a permanent, full member of that political society. Tacit consent, on the other hand, is silent and implied. Locke argues that if an individual enjoys any part of the dominions of a government—whether by owning land, renting a house, traveling freely on the highway, or even simply breathing the air within its borders—they are giving their tacit consent to be subject to its laws. However, tacit consent only binds a person as long as they remain within that territory. If they sell their property and leave, they are free to join another political society or start a new one in the wilderness.

Once a political society is formed, the majority has the right to act and conclude the rest. This majority vote establishes the legislative power, which Locke calls the supreme power of the commonwealth. The legislature is the soul of the state, responsible for making the laws that govern the community. However, Locke is careful to emphasize that the power of the legislature is not absolute; it is a fiduciary power entrusted to them for the sole purpose of protecting the lives, liberties, and estates of the citizens.

Because the legislative power is a trust, it is bound by four strict, constitutional limits. First, it must govern by established, promulgated laws that apply equally to all citizens, rich and poor alike, rather than by arbitrary, extemporary decrees. Second, these laws must be designed for no other end ultimately but the good of the people. Third, the government must not raise taxes on the property of the people without their own consent, given by themselves or their deputies. Since the preservation of property is the very reason people entered society, allowing the government to take it away arbitrarily would defeat the entire purpose of the social contract. Fourth, the legislature cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. Since the people placed this trust specifically in the legislature, the legislature has no right to delegate that authority to an unelected monarch, a foreign power, or an administrative bureaucracy.

## 7. Key Concept: Tyranny, Dissolution, and the Right of Revolution

The final chapters of the *Second Treatise* contain some of the most politically explosive ideas in the history of Western thought. Having argued that government is a limited trust, Locke must now address the inevitable question: What happens when that trust is broken? What can the people do if their rulers abuse their power, violate their natural rights, and turn into tyrants?

Locke begins by defining tyranny as the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. It is the use of the power that anyone has in their hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for their own private, separate advantage. When a ruler—whether a king, an assembly, or a parliament—ignores the law, acts on their own arbitrary will, and invades the property and liberty of the citizens, they cease to be a legitimate authority. In Locke’s terms, they have un-kinged themselves.

When this happens, the government is dissolved. Locke makes a crucial distinction between the dissolution of society and the dissolution of government. When a government is dissolved, the political society itself does not collapse into a Hobbesian state of chaos. The social contract that binds the citizens to one another remains intact. It is only the political superstructure—the specific administration of rulers—that has been dismantled. The power that the people delegated to their government reverts to them, and they have a right to resume their original liberty and establish a new legislative power to provide for their safety and security.

This is the famous right of revolution, which Locke colorfully refers to as the "Appeal to Heaven." When there is no common judge on earth to resolve a dispute between the people and their rulers, the only recourse left is to appeal to the supreme judge of all men, which is God, by engaging in armed resistance. Locke anticipates the fierce criticism this doctrine would receive from defenders of the status quo, who argued that telling the people they have a right to rebel would lead to perpetual civil war, anarchy, and chaos.

Locke offers a robust defense against this charge. First, he argues that the doctrine of the right to resist does not cause revolutions; rather, it is the misgovernment and tyranny of rulers that causes them. People do not rebel over minor mistakes or occasional lapses in judgment. They are naturally conservative and slow to change their established forms of government. It is only after a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, that the people finally rouse themselves to take action. 

Second, Locke argues that the right of revolution is actually the best fence against rebellion. By clearly stating that rulers will be held accountable if they violate the trust of the people, the doctrine acts as a powerful deterrent against tyranny. The true rebels, Locke insists, are not the citizens who defend their rights, but the rulers who use force to violate the laws and oppress their people. It is the tyrant who introduces a state of war into the commonwealth, and in that state of war, all previous obligations are void.

## 8. The Blind Spots: Exclusion, Empire, and Colonialism

While the *Second Treatise* is celebrated as a foundational text of modern liberal democracy, a rigorous and fair reading requires us to confront its significant blind spots, contradictions, and historical complicities. Locke’s theories of property, freedom, and consent, which sound so universal on the page, were historically used to justify systems of exclusion, colonial dispossession, and chattel slavery.

The most glaring tension lies in Locke’s theory of property and its application to the colonization of the Americas. In Chapter Five, Locke repeatedly references "America" as a symbol of the wild, uncultivated state of nature, famously declaring that "in the beginning, all the world was America." He argued that because the Indigenous peoples of the Americas did not practice European-style, sedentary agriculture—enclosing fields, tilling the soil, and producing goods for a commercial market—they had not mixed their labor with the land in a way that created private property rights. 

In Locke’s view, the vast forests and plains of America were essentially waste, waiting to be claimed and improved by industrious European settlers. By defining property through the lens of agricultural improvement and commercial utility, Locke provided a powerful intellectual justification for the dispossession of Indigenous populations. Their centuries-long stewardship of the land was erased and deemed legally irrelevant because it did not conform to capitalist metrics of value.

Furthermore, Locke’s personal life and financial investments stand in stark contrast to his philosophical defense of human liberty. While writing about the evils of slavery and asserting that no man can subject himself to the arbitrary power of another, Locke was a major shareholder in the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the British slave trade. He also served as the secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, where he helped draft the *Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina* in 1669. This document explicitly stated that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever."

Scholars have struggled to reconcile Locke the philosopher of liberty with Locke the colonial administrator and investor in slavery. Some argue that Locke’s defense of slavery in the *Second Treatise*—which he limits strictly to captives taken in a "just war"—was a desperate attempt to rationalize a highly profitable and brutal institution. Others suggest that Locke’s concept of "reason" was deeply exclusionary, reserved primarily for propertied European men, while women, servants, wage laborers, and non-European peoples were viewed as lacking the full rational capacity required to enjoy natural rights and participate in political consent. By acknowledging these dark dimensions, we do not diminish the power of Locke’s ideas, but we gain a more honest, complete, and critical understanding of how early liberal theory was entangled with the rise of global empire and racial capitalism.

## 9. How to Read the Second Treatise Without Getting Lost

Reading the *Second Treatise of Government* for the first time can be a challenging experience, even for advanced students. Locke’s seventeenth-century prose is characterized by long, winding sentences, archaic vocabulary, and a rhetorical style that can feel repetitive to modern ears. To help you navigate this classic text without getting lost, here are several practical strategies and key concepts to keep in mind as you read.

First, pay close attention to how Locke defines his terms, as he often uses familiar words in highly specific, philosophical ways. The most important example of this is his use of the word "property." While we usually think of property as material possessions, like land, money, or houses, Locke frequently uses the term in a much broader sense to refer to "life, liberty, and estate." When Locke says that the primary purpose of government is the preservation of property, he is not just defending the wealth of the rich; he is defending the bodily integrity, personal freedom, and material goods of every individual. Always ask yourself which definition of property Locke is using in any given passage.

Second, keep track of the silent interlocutors in the background of the text. Although Locke rarely mentions them by name, he is constantly arguing against two major intellectual rivals: Sir Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes. When Locke discusses paternal power and insists that the authority of a father over his children is temporary and completely distinct from political power, he is taking aim at Filmer’s patriarchal defense of absolute monarchy. When Locke discusses the state of nature and insists that it is not a state of war, and that the social contract does not require the surrender of individual rights, he is trying to dismantle Hobbes’s authoritarian defense of the Leviathan. Understanding these hidden polemics will help you make sense of why Locke structures his arguments the way he does.

Third, do not skip Chapter Five on property, but read it with a critical eye. It is the intellectual core of the book and the source of his most influential ideas, but it is also the most difficult to reconcile with his broader political theory. Look out for the transition from the pre-monetary state of nature to the post-monetary commercial society. Notice how the introduction of money subtly shifts the moral landscape, allowing for the very inequalities that the social contract is designed to manage.

Finally, be prepared for the theological foundations of Locke’s argument. Modern readers often try to read Locke as a secular, utilitarian political theorist, but his arguments are deeply rooted in Christian theology. His concepts of natural law, human equality, and the right of revolution are all built on the premise that human beings are created by God, belong to God, and are bound by a divine moral order. If you try to strip the theology out of the *Second Treatise*, many of Locke’s key assertions—such as why we have a duty to preserve others, or why we cannot sell ourselves into slavery—will lose their logical coherence.

## 10. Why We Still Read Locke: His Legacy and Who Should Read Him Now

More than three centuries after its publication, the *Second Treatise of Government* remains one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought. Its impact on the development of modern liberal democracy is hard to overstate. It provided the intellectual blueprint for the constitutional changes in Great Britain following the Glorious Revolution, helping to establish the principle of parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law.

But perhaps the most dramatic realization of Locke’s ideas occurred across the Atlantic, in the British colonies of North America. When Thomas Jefferson sat down to draft the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, he turned to Locke for inspiration. Jefferson’s famous assertion that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," is a direct, poetic echo of Locke’s natural rights formulation. The Declaration’s argument that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, is pure, unadulterated Locke.

Today, we continue to live in a world shaped by the questions Locke raised and the vocabulary he provided. Whenever we debate the limits of government surveillance, the justice of taxation, the boundaries of private property, or the legitimacy of civil disobedience, we are engaging in a conversation that Locke helped start. His ideas are built into the very architecture of our constitutional systems, from the separation of powers to the protection of individual liberties.

Who should read the *Second Treatise* today? It is essential reading for students of political science, philosophy, history, and law. But it is also a vital text for any citizen who wants to understand the intellectual foundations of the modern democratic state. In an era when liberal democratic institutions are facing renewed challenges from authoritarianism, populism, and deep political polarization, returning to Locke allows us to re-examine the core principles of our political order.

By reading Locke, we are forced to grapple with the fundamental tensions of our society: How do we balance individual freedom with the common good? What are the limits of political obligation? And how do we ensure that our institutions remain worthy of the consent of the governed? The *Second Treatise* does not offer simple, ready-made answers to these modern dilemmas, but it provides us with the essential tools, concepts, and questions to navigate them with intellectual rigor and historical depth.

Thank you for listening to this Emma's Library deep review of John Locke's *Second Treatise of Government*. We hope this guide has provided you with the context, clarity, and critical perspectives needed to appreciate and engage with this foundational work of political theory.