Two Treatises of Government

The Second Treatise's core claim is that political authority is legitimate only when it derives from the consent of free and equal individuals who entrust government with protecting their natural rights. It rejects Robert Filmer's patriarchalism—the doctrine that Adam's paternal authority over his children was inherited by kings, making monarchy divinely ordained. The First Treatise methodically dismantles Filmer's scriptural arguments, while the Second Treatise replaces them with a secular-contractual framework. The book thus rejects both divine-right absolutism and Hobbes's version of sovereignty, in which subjects alienate their rights entirely to an absolute ruler.

Locke articulated what scholars call an authorization theory of the social contract, distinct from Hobbes's alienation theory[citation:6]. On Locke's account, individuals do not surrender their rights when they enter civil society; they authorize government to act on their behalf for specified ends, retaining ultimate judgment over whether that trust is being fulfilled. This conditional, revocable model of political authority underlies modern constitutionalism, the idea of limited government, and the right of revolution. It directly informed the American Declaration of Independence and the structure of checks and balances in liberal democratic constitutions.

Both begin from a state of nature, but Locke's is not a war of all against all. For Hobbes, the state of nature is so dangerous that individuals must alienate their rights to an absolute sovereign who cannot be resisted. Locke argues that the state of nature, while inconvenient, is governed by a law of nature discoverable by reason, and that individuals retain their natural rights when forming government[citation:6][citation:18]. Government is a fiduciary trust, not an unaccountable sovereign. When it violates that trust, citizens may resist—an option Hobbes explicitly forecloses.

Not straightforwardly. The standard reading emphasizes property rights and limited government, and libertarian thinkers have drawn on Locke to oppose redistribution[citation:5]. But Locke's Second Treatise contains passages complicating that reading. In Chapter 5, he qualifies property acquisition by the proviso that 'enough and as good' must be left for others, and in Chapter 15 he describes obligations of support owed to parents that may analogize to broader social duties. Scholars such as Rawls have argued Locke's premises support more than minimal government. The text is more contested than its libertarian appropriation suggests.

The first edition appeared anonymously in 1689, and its date of composition has been debated. Peter Laslett's influential scholarship established that it was likely written during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1683, making it a work of political polemic responding to contemporary English disputes, not a retrospective justification of the 1688 Glorious Revolution[citation:10][citation:20]. Reading it as abstract philosophy misses its immediate context. The anonymity also reflects the danger of arguing against royal authority under Charles II. Knowing the political occasion sharpens understanding of why Locke attacks Filmer so specifically and why consent is framed as a defensive doctrine.

Its core architecture—natural rights, consent, limited government, the right of resistance—remains foundational to liberal political theory and constitutional practice. Yet its historical accuracy about the state of nature and the origins of property has been criticized by later thinkers, including Hume and Rousseau. The notion of tacit consent, which Locke uses to explain why individuals born into existing states are bound, has been called too weak to ground political obligation. And the exclusion of women and the propertyless from full political participation reflects its time. The book endures less as empirical history than as a normative framework for evaluating political legitimacy.