John Locke · Politics
Why your rights come before any government, and what makes power legitimate - Locke’s overturning of the divine right of kings.
Locke begins with a thought experiment. Picture humans before any state exists. Are we lawless animals? No. Locke argues we are still bound by a law of nature, knowable by reason, that no one should harm another’s life, liberty or possessions. The state of nature is not a state of license; it has a moral law built into it, which reason can read, and which holds whether or not any king or parliament exists to enforce it.
Locke’s state of nature has two faces, and both are essential. It is a state of perfect freedom - each person may order their actions as they see fit, without asking leave of anyone. And it is a state of perfect equality - no one is born with natural authority over another; there is no natural king, no natural subject. But freedom is not the same as license. The law of nature - reason - teaches that because all are equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in life, health, liberty, or possessions, and each has a duty to preserve the rest of mankind as far as they can. Even without government, then, there are real rights and real duties, written into the human condition and legible to reason. Government, when it comes, does not invent these; it inherits them, and is bound by them.
Why leave the state of nature at all, if it already has a moral law? Because, Locke admits, enforcement is the problem. In the state of nature each person is judge in their own case, which is a recipe for endless, escalating disputes - everyone biased in their own favour, with no neutral authority to settle quarrels or punish aggressors impartially. So people agree to form a government: to appoint a common, impartial judge, with known laws and the power to enforce them, precisely in order to protect the rights they already have. But - and this is the crucial limit - they surrender only as much of their natural freedom as this protection requires, and they hand power to the government in trust, for the good of the governed. The government is a trustee, not a master; it holds power on condition, and only for the end of protecting the people’s rights.
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 government in natural rights and consent. Hobbes started from the same idea of a state of nature but reached the opposite conclusion. State Hobbes’s view, then explain why he reached it.
Leads to Thomas Hobbes.
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