John Locke · Politics
Locke’s most explosive claim: that when a government betrays the people’s trust and turns to tyranny, the people may rightfully resist, dissolve it, and start anew.
For Locke, political power is not owned by rulers; it is entrusted to them by the people for a specific purpose - to protect everyone’s life, liberty, and property. This reframing is revolutionary in itself. A trust can be betrayed. If those entrusted with power use it not to protect the people but to harm them - seizing property, ruling arbitrarily, placing themselves above the law - they have broken the very condition on which their authority rested, and the trust is forfeit.
An obvious objection arises: who decides whether the government has actually broken its trust? The ruler will always deny it. Locke’s answer is bold and democratic: the people shall be judge. Since the power was originally theirs, given in trust, they retain the ultimate authority to judge whether that trust has been kept. There is no higher earthly court to appeal to between a people and their government; when the normal channels of justice are themselves corrupted or closed, the only appeal left is what Locke calls the ‘appeal to heaven’ - the resort to force, leaving the outcome to God and to the justice of the cause.
Locke’s most solemn and dangerous phrase is the ‘appeal to heaven.’ Normally, disputes between people are settled by an impartial judge with the authority and power to enforce a verdict - that is the whole point of leaving the state of nature for government. But what happens when the dispute is between the people and the government itself, and the government controls the courts, the laws, and the sword? Then there is no impartial earthly judge to appeal to; the very institutions that should adjudicate are the accused. In that extremity, Locke says, the only appeal left is ‘to heaven’ - meaning the resort to force, the trial of arms, with the outcome left to God and to the justice of the cause.
This phrase carries Locke’s whole sense of the gravity of revolution. The appeal to heaven is not a casual option; it is what you are reduced to when every peaceful and legal remedy has been exhausted or corrupted - the last resort of a people with nowhere else to turn. It is, in a sense, a return to the state of nature between the people and their faithless rulers, where each must defend their rights as best they can. Locke borrows the phrase from the biblical judge Jephthah, who, facing an enemy with no common arbiter, called on God to judge between them. The appeal to heaven is thus both a sober warning - revolution means abandoning the safety of settled justice for the terrible uncertainty of force - and a profound affirmation: that even when a tyrant has captured every earthly institution, the people are not without recourse, for the justice of their cause stands above the tyrant’s power, and they may stake everything on it.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Locke grounds a right of revolution in the breach of trust. Explain when that right is triggered and what stops it from being abused, in your own words.
Leads to Thomas Jefferson.
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