Second Treatise of Government

Overview

The Second Treatise is a hundred and fifty pages of numbered sections, nineteen chapters, and prose that a student can read without help. That plainness is part of its politics: Locke is arguing that anyone who consults reason can work out the terms on which they are governed.

It was published anonymously in 1689, months after William and Mary took the English throne, and Locke never publicly admitted he wrote it. For a long time it was read as a justification of that revolution after the fact. Peter Laslett’s scholarship established that most of it was written around 1681, during the crisis over excluding the Catholic James from the succession, when the argument was not a defence of an accomplished fact but a case for resistance that could have got its author hanged. Locke had already gone into exile in Holland. Read with that date in mind, the closing chapters stop sounding complacent.

The First Treatise, which almost nobody reads, is a demolition of Sir Robert Filmer’s claim that kings inherit Adam’s paternal authority over the world. It matters because it clears the ground: once inherited authority is gone, something has to explain why anyone may command anyone, and the Second Treatise is that explanation.

One structural feature to notice. Locke’s method throughout is counterfactual. He asks what human beings would be entitled to without government, and then treats political power as consisting only of what those people could rationally have handed over. Everything else remains theirs.

The argument

Chapters I to III establish the starting condition. All are equal in the sense that no one has natural jurisdiction over another. The law of nature obliges everyone and is knowable by reason, and it forbids harming another’s life, health, liberty or possessions, and also forbids destroying yourself. Each person may punish violations, which Locke calls the strange doctrine of the executive power of the law of nature, since it is the premise his critics find hardest. The state of nature is emphatically not a state of war; war begins when someone uses force without right.

Chapter V is on property and is where the interesting trouble starts. The earth is given to humanity in common, yet nothing is usable until it is taken, and taking would seem to need everyone’s agreement. Locke’s solution is labour. Each person owns their own person and therefore their work, and mixing work with a common thing makes it theirs. Two limits are stated: leave enough and as good for others, and take no more than you can use before it spoils. Then Locke observes that money does not spoil, that land left uncultivated produces little, and that a labourer in England is better off than a chief in America. By the end of the chapter the limits have been argued out of the way.

Chapters VII to IX explain the move to government. Private enforcement is unreliable because people judge their own cases partially. So individuals consent to give up the executive power and submit to a common judge. What they cannot give up is more than they had, which means arbitrary power over life, or the power to destroy or enslave, can never be legitimately held.

Chapters X to XIV set out the institutions. The legislative is supreme but fiduciary, bound to govern by promulgated standing laws and to tax only with consent. The executive is subordinate and holds a prerogative to act for the public good where law is silent, which Locke handles carefully and which a good seminar will press on. Chapter XVI on conquest denies that force ever creates right.

Chapter XIX, on the dissolution of government, is the payload. Locke distinguishes the dissolution of the society, which happens only by foreign conquest, from the dissolution of the government, which happens when the legislative is altered or when rulers act against the trust reposed in them. In that case authority reverts to the people, who may erect a new form. Who judges whether the trust has been broken? Locke’s answer is that the people shall be judge, and he knows how much weight that places on them.

How to read it

Read chapters II, III, V, VIII, IX, XI, XIII and XIX and you have the argument. Chapter V is the one to read twice, slowly, with a pencil, because the two limits on appropriation are introduced and then quietly dismantled, and tracking exactly where that happens is the best exercise the book offers.

Chapter VIII on tacit consent deserves the same suspicion. Locke needs to explain how people who never signed anything are bound, and his answer, that enjoying the benefits of a territory implies consent, has struck readers from Hume onward as doing too much work.

Compare him with Hobbes as you go, and notice that the difference is not optimism about human nature but a different account of what the law of nature is and who may enforce it. Locke’s people in the state of nature are already under obligations, which is why they can never be understood to have surrendered everything.

Read the later chapters against 1681 rather than 1689. And read section 49 on America, and the passages on land left waste, next to the fact that Locke helped draft the constitution for Carolina. The theory has a history, and pretending otherwise makes the text smaller.

The Macpherson Hackett edition is cheap and standard; his introduction pushes a strong thesis, which is useful to argue with. Laslett’s Cambridge text is the scholarly one.

Questions it raises

• Does mixing labour with something explain why it becomes mine, or only why I deserve something for the labour?
• Locke says enough must be left for others. Once that condition fails, as he admits it can, what happens to existing property?
• Tacit consent binds people who never agreed to anything. Is that consent in any meaningful sense?
• If the people judge whether the trust is broken, what distinguishes justified revolution from mere faction?
• Executive prerogative lets a ruler act outside the law for the public good. Can that be reconciled with the rest of the book?
• Locke’s account of vacant land was used to dispossess people who were living on it. Is that a misuse of the argument or an implication of it?