John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689): Natural Rights

John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in London in late 1689, although its title page bears the date 1690. It argues that all people possess natural rights, that legitimate government depends on the consent of the governed, and that a people may resist a ruler who betrays their trust. Appearing in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, it became one of the founding texts of liberal democracy.

Background: the Exclusion Crisis

John Locke (1632–1704) was an Oxford-trained physician and philosopher who became secretary and adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury led the campaign between 1679 and 1681 to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from succeeding his brother Charles II. This period is known as the Exclusion Crisis.

Defenders of the Stuart monarchy revived the writings of Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha, written decades earlier, was published in 1680. Filmer claimed that kings held absolute power by direct inheritance from Adam, the first father, and that subjects had no right to resist. Locke set out to demolish this theory and offer an alternative account of political power.

The editor Peter Laslett showed in 1960 that most of the text was probably written around 1679–1683, not after 1688 as was long assumed. When Shaftesbury’s cause collapsed, Locke fled to the Dutch Republic in 1683 and lived there in exile until February 1689, when he returned to England on the ship that brought Princess Mary to join her husband William.

Publication in 1689

After the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with William III and Mary II, Locke prepared the manuscript for the press. His preface said he hoped the book would help to establish the throne of “our great restorer, our present King William” and to justify his title by the consent of the people.

The book appeared without the author’s name, at about the same time as Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his Letter Concerning Toleration. Although many suspected Locke wrote it, he denied or avoided the question for years and only acknowledged it formally in a codicil to his will in 1704.

The First Treatise

The First Treatise is a detailed, often sarcastic, refutation of Filmer. Locke argued that the Bible gave Adam no private dominion over the world or over other people, that fatherly authority is not the same as political power, and that even if Adam had held such power, no one could now identify his rightful heir. Because it is so closely tied to Filmer’s arguments, it is much less read today.

The Second Treatise: rights, consent and resistance

The Second Treatise sets out Locke’s own theory. Its key ideas can be summarised as follows:

• The state of nature. Before government, people live in a state of equality governed by a law of nature, known through reason, which forbids harming another’s life, health, liberty or possessions.
• Natural rights. Each person has rights to life, liberty and “estate”, which Locke often bundles together under the word property.
• Property through labour. Individuals acquire property by mixing their labour with what nature provides in common, within limits such as not letting things spoil.
• Consent. People leave the state of nature and form political society by agreement, to protect their rights more securely. The majority then decides how the society is governed.
• Limited government. The legislature is the supreme power, but it holds that power on trust and may not take property without consent, usually expressed through representatives.
• Right of resistance. When rulers act against the trust placed in them, government is dissolved and the people may establish a new one.

Locke’s approach differed sharply from Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan also began from a state of nature but concluded that people should submit to an almost unlimited sovereign. For Locke, government exists to protect rights that people already have, not to create them.

Key people

John Locke combined careers as a physician, civil servant and philosopher. Besides the Two Treatises, his Essay Concerning Human Understanding made him the leading English philosopher of his generation, and after 1689 he served on the Board of Trade, which oversaw England’s colonies.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, was Locke’s patron and the leader of the Whig opposition to the Duke of York. Arrested for treason in 1681, he escaped trial when a London grand jury threw out the charge, but he fled to the Netherlands in 1682 and died in Amsterdam in 1683. Locke’s close association with him placed the philosopher under government suspicion.

Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653) was a Kentish gentleman and royalist writer. He had died long before the Exclusion Crisis, but his defence of patriarchal monarchy was published posthumously and became the main target of Locke’s work, as well as of other Whig writers such as Algernon Sidney.

William III, Prince of Orange, became king jointly with Mary II in February 1689. Locke praised him in the preface, and the new regime offered Locke posts in government.

Myths and facts

Locke wrote the book to justify 1688. The preface invites this reading, but the evidence of Locke’s papers suggests most of it was composed years earlier, as a radical Whig argument during the Exclusion Crisis.

Locke said “life, liberty and property”. He wrote of “lives, liberties and estates” and used “property” to cover all three. The exact triad usually quoted is a later simplification.

Locke was a democrat in the modern sense. He defended government by consent and majority rule, but he did not call for universal suffrage, and he accepted a property-based electorate.

Context and limits

Locke’s principles fitted the settlement of 1689, including the English Bill of Rights, which limited royal power and asserted the role of Parliament. Yet the revolution’s leaders mostly justified it in narrower legal terms, and Locke’s radical language of dissolution and resistance was not the official position.

Modern scholars also point to tensions in his work. Locke condemned slavery as contrary to natural freedom, yet he invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which gave masters absolute power over enslaved people. His argument that uncultivated land could be appropriated by labour was later used to justify taking Indigenous land in North America, and he wrote that “in the beginning all the world was America”.

Legacy

During the eighteenth century the Two Treatises was reprinted many times and translated into French, influencing Enlightenment writers. In the American colonies, its ideas about natural rights and consent were widely cited in pamphlets of the 1760s and 1770s. The phrases of the Declaration of Independence about unalienable rights and the consent of the governed closely echo Locke, although historians debate how far the authors drew on him directly rather than on a broader tradition.

Today Locke is regarded as a founder of classical liberalism. Concepts such as limited government, the rule of law, individual rights and the legitimacy of peaceful change of rulers owe much to his formulation.

Timeline

• 1632, 29 August: John Locke is born at Wrington, Somerset.
• 1667: Locke joins the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury.
• 1680: Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha is published.
• c. 1679–1683: Locke writes most of the Two Treatises.
• 1683: Locke goes into exile in the Dutch Republic.
• 1689, February: Locke returns to England after the Glorious Revolution.
• 1689, late in the year: The Two Treatises is published anonymously, dated 1690.
• 1704, 28 October: Locke dies at Otes, High Laver, Essex, having acknowledged authorship in his will.

Why it matters

The Two Treatises of Government gave a systematic answer to a basic question: why should anyone obey a government? Locke’s answer, that authority rests on consent and exists to protect natural rights, shaped revolutions, constitutions and debates about human rights for the next three centuries.