Second Treatise of Government

The natural rights of man is perhaps one of the broadest, and most singularly important, themes of both the Second Treatise and the Enlightenment. While Locke didn’t invent concepts like the state of nature, the state of war, property rights, or the right to revolution, he did articulate them in such a way that his interpretation and presentation of those ideas have come to represent the central definitions for them. Locke’s work wouldn’t become popular for another century or so after publication—but when it did, it led to some of the greatest, and bloodiest, periods of social upheaval in Western history.

Again, Locke’s assertion that men exist in a natural state of peace without a monarch, sovereign, or general leader was not new, but his belief that this state is the base relationship between human beings, something that can’t ever really or fully be left, was a fundamentally unique perspective. Conversely, a political predecessor of his, Thomas Hobbes, viewed the state of nature as an ancient and temporary state that human beings abdicated when they opted to live in political society. While this assertion may not entirely be off the mark, it’s the open-ended potential of Locke’s interpretation that won him so much acclaim later in the life of his work. Likewise, Locke’s idea of the state of war—which is somewhat closer to Hobbes’s idea of the state of nature—as a temporary and brutal relationship between people who have encroached on each other’s natural rights, was a novel concept, given that it does not entirely strip people of their capacity for reason but instead argues that it is their reason alone—which is not destroyed in the state of war, but rather lays dormant—that will lift them out of such an antipathetic dialectic.

Property rights as Locke conceives of them would have been almost inconceivable to many people of his time. Though the Enlightenment was in full swing, many still labored under a kind of fiefdom, where they worked on land owned in common by the state—and therefore by the monarch. In this structure, the common people owned very little and saw very little in their life as their own, including their labor. By asserting that property is not simply an object but an extension of person by way of creation, Locke redefined what it means to own and to create. Many who are unfamiliar with his writings believe that property rights mean nothing more than pure ownership of an estate, of land, of objects—but Locke’s idea of property rights is more complex. He wanted to cement a philosophical and political definition for a person’s right to own whatever they may create with their own hands. Much in the same way that parents have a right in some capacity to their children, Locke believed everyone has a right to the product of their own labor, which he would call their property.

Following these two ideas is the most radical and dangerous proposition in the entire Treatise. The idea that a people have the right to choose their rulers and actively depose them when they see fit would have unsettled any monarch in Locke’s era. While the power of monarchy was waning across Europe, it would still be another 100 years before the most powerful monarchy of all—Britain—was deposed from its own colony, and it would be another 60 years after that before a wave of revolutions would sweep monarchy off the table of the European Continent altogether.

This assertion completely changes the relationship a people has with their ruler. Instead of making the people subject to a rule for as long as the ruler remains alive—which in the case of a monarch could be upward of 50 years, and in the case of a legislative body could be almost indefinite—Locke’s system makes the ruler subject to the people. This goes along with his belief that a political society was secondary to the community, the collection of people in any given area who agreed to a common bond and relationship between themselves. In proposing such a radical notion, Locke somewhat immortalized the idea of a people’s ability for self-government absent a necessarily “political” structure.