John Locke

Western Political Thought: Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, John S. Mill, Marx, Gramsci, Hannah Arendt. Also serves the Liberal theory of the state, the theory of rights, and liberalism as an ideology.

Official Syllabus: Paper I, Section A, Unit 10

John Locke is the thinker every modern constitution quietly assumes. Limited government, rights that exist before the state and survive it, rulers who hold power on trust, a people entitled to take that power back, and a state with no business inside a man’s conscience — all of it is in the Second Treatise, and almost none of it was in political theory before him.

He is also the most contested figure in the canon. The same book has been read as the charter of constitutional liberty, as the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie, as a covert restatement of Hobbes, as a work of Calvinist theology, and as a licence for taking land from the people living on it. The disagreement is not a failure of scholarship; it is a property of the text, which argues on several levels at once and does not always reconcile them.

What makes him the hinge of modern politics is one structural move. Hobbes and Locke start from almost identical premises — free and equal individuals, a state of nature, a contract — and arrive at opposite states, because Locke changed a single assumption about what men are like when nobody is watching.

Restoration England and the Making of a Revolutionary

Wrington, Westminster, Oxford

• Born 29 August 1632 at Wrington in Somerset, into a Puritan family of modest gentry; died at Oates in Essex on 28 October 1704.
• His father was a country lawyer who served as a captain of horse in the Parliamentary army — the household was on the anti-royalist side of the great English quarrel from the start.
• Patronage from his father’s commander carried him to Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, where he stayed for years as student, tutor and censor of moral philosophy.
• He disliked the scholastic Aristotelianism Oxford still taught. What held him was the new experimental science being made outside the universities.

Medicine, Boyle and the New Science

• He trained and practised in medicine, was elected to the Royal Society, and worked with the chemist Robert Boyle and the physician Thomas Sydenham.
• The scientific training is the source of his method — distrust of systems built downwards from first principles, preference for what experience delivers.
• Sydenham’s clinical empiricism, describing diseases as they present rather than deducing them from humoral theory, is the direct model for the Essay‘s treatment of ideas.
• The medical skill also changed his life. A liver operation in 1668 saved Lord Ashley, and made Locke indispensable to the most dangerous politician in England.

Shaftesbury: Physician, Secretary, Conspirator

• Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, took Locke into his household in 1667 — first as physician, quickly as secretary, adviser and political operator.
• Shaftesbury was Lord Chancellor, then leader of the emerging Whig opposition, and finally an accused conspirator. Locke’s fortunes tracked his exactly.
• Through him Locke held real office: secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, later a commissioner of the Board of Trade.
• This makes Locke a working colonial administrator as well as a philosopher, and puts him inside the constitutional crisis that produced the Two Treatises.
• The connection explains the book’s tone. He wrote as a member of a faction that expected arrest, not as a detached observer of a settled order.

The Exclusion Crisis

• The crisis ran from 1679 to 1681 and turned on one question: whether James, Duke of York, a declared Catholic, could be excluded from the succession.
• Shaftesbury led the Exclusion campaign in Parliament, organising the Whig interest around fear of a Catholic monarch and French-style absolutism.
• Charles II dissolved Parliament rather than accept exclusion, dismissed Shaftesbury, and moved to rule without it. Absolutism looked like winning.
• The royalist side needed a theory and found one in a dead man’s manuscript. Filmer’s Patriarcha, written decades earlier, was published in 1680 to arm the Court party.
• The Two Treatises is a weapon from this fight. Its target is Filmer because Filmer was the Court’s intellectual armament in a live succession crisis.

Exile in Holland

• Shaftesbury was charged with treason, fled, and died at Amsterdam in 1683. Locke went into voluntary exile in Holland the same year, correctly suspecting surveillance.
• The Rye House Plot to assassinate the King and his brother was exposed in 1683; Algernon Sidney was executed, and Locke’s associates were scattered or hanged.
• He was struck off the rolls of Christ Church by royal command and lived under assumed names between Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam.
• The Letter Concerning Toleration was written in Latin in Holland — the most religiously plural country in Europe and a refuge for dissenters of every kind.
• He moved in the radical Whig exile community, evidence Ashcraft later used to argue that Locke was no moderate constitutionalist but a revolutionary conspirator.

The Glorious Revolution and the Return

• James II succeeded in 1685 and within three years had alienated even Tories by his Catholicising policy and his suspension of the penal laws by prerogative.
• In 1688 a coalition of Whigs and Tories invited William of Orange to invade; James fled, and the Convention Parliament settled the throne on William and Mary.
• Locke returned in 1689 on the ship carrying Princess Mary and published, anonymously and in quick succession, the works that made his reputation.
• He called William the “great restorer” and framed the Two Treatises in its preface as vindicating the new settlement’s title in the consent of the people.
• The revolution he came home to was the most conservative in Europe — a change of dynasty, not of social order — which is why he has so often been called its cautious apologist.

The Corpus

Work	Published	What it does
Two Treatises of Government	1689 (dated 1690)	First Treatise demolishes Filmer; Second Treatise builds government from natural law, consent and trust
A Letter Concerning Toleration	1689	Separates civil interest from the care of souls; church as a voluntary society
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding	1689 (dated 1690)	Rejects innate ideas; mind as white paper; knowledge from sensation and reflection
Some Thoughts Concerning Education	1693	Character, habit and reason over rote; the practical arm of the epistemology
The Reasonableness of Christianity	1695	A minimal, rational Christianity — few essential doctrines, therefore little to persecute over
Two further Letters on Toleration	1690, 1692	Replies to Jonas Proast, who argued that force works indirectly

• Locke published almost everything anonymously and acknowledged the Two Treatises only in his will — a man does not hide a book that merely praises the government of the day.
• The Essay and the Treatises appeared within weeks of each other, which is why asking whether his empiricism can support his natural law is not an artificial exercise.

Laslett’s Dating Discovery — and Why It Matters

• The old reading treated the Two Treatises as a justification written after 1688 to defend a revolution that had already happened.
• Peter Laslett destroyed that reading. Working on Locke’s papers, he showed from manuscripts, book purchases and internal evidence that the bulk was composed around 1679–1681, during the Exclusion Crisis.
• His second finding is equally sharp: the Second Treatise was written first, with the anti-Filmer polemic prefixed afterwards — reversing the order in which the book is read.
• The consequence is a change of genre. The book is not an apology for a completed revolution but an incitement to one that had not yet occurred — written when the Whigs were losing and publishing it would have been treason.
• Richard Ashcraft pushed further, tying the text to the conspiratorial politics of 1681–1683 and reading “resistance to tyranny is everyone’s business” as Locke’s actual position.
• The full thesis is not universally accepted: the dating and order remain contested, and John Dunn has qualified them. But the essential correction — that the book precedes the revolution — is now the settled starting point.

Locke’s book was not written to explain a revolution that had happened. It was written to justify one its author hoped to bring about.

The First Treatise: Demolishing Patriarchalism

Filmer’s Patriarcha

• Sir Robert Filmer argued that political authority is patriarchal and divinely granted, and that natural freedom is a modern fiction.
• God gave Adam dominion over the earth and over Eve, absolutely and unconditionally; Adam was therefore the first king, his authority proprietary as well as political.
• All later kings are Adam’s heirs. Sovereignty descends by inheritance from the first father, so the king’s power is the father’s power, only larger.
• Men are not born free. They are born into families, subject to a father they never chose, and this natural subjection is what contract theory denies.
• Limiting absolutism ends in anarchy, since a power that can be limited is not sovereign, and a state without a sovereign dissolves.

Filmer’s Case Against the Contract

Filmer was not merely asserting divine right; he was attacking the alternative, and his objections were good enough that Locke had to answer each one.

• The contract cannot bind future generations. If authority rests on the will of the men who made it, no descendant is bound by his forefathers’ agreement.
• The contract cannot explain property. If God gave the earth to mankind in common, nobody can appropriate anything without every other person’s consent — which is impossible.
• Common ownership raises the spectre of communism. Contract theory, taken seriously, makes private property indefensible.
• Consent theory therefore fails twice — no morally acceptable basis of authority, and no account of rightful possession.
• This is the frame Locke inherits. He must answer the property objection as forcefully as the authority objection, which is why the Second Treatise‘s fifth chapter is so elaborate.

Locke’s Refutation: Adam’s Grant

• The scriptural exegesis is destroyed line by line. Genesis grants Adam dominion over the beasts and the fruits of the earth, not over other men.
• Dominion over things is not jurisdiction over persons. Filmer’s edifice depends on sliding from one to the other, and the slide has no textual warrant.
• Eve’s subjection is conjugal, not political — a description of marriage in a fallen world, not a grant of sovereign power to husbands.
• Even conceding Adam’s grant, inheritance destroys it. The title would pass to one determinate heir each generation, and by any rule of descent that heir is unknowable.
• The reductio is decisive. If only Adam’s true heir may rule, every existing government is usurped and no subject anywhere owes obedience — the opposite of Filmer’s purpose.

The Argument from Paternal Power

• The second front attacks the analogy. The state is not a family but a family of families, and the two authorities differ in kind, not in size.
• Paternal authority is temporary and purposive. It exists because children lack reason, is exercised for their good, and expires when they acquire the reason it compensated for.
• Political authority governs adults who already possess reason, and who depend on the state for a few specific purposes rather than for everything.
• Locke prefers parental to paternal power, since the mother has an equal share — a small correction with large consequences for the patriarchal case.
• Aristotle had made the point first: the authority of a master differs from that of a statesman. Locke’s separation of household from commonwealth restates it in modern terms.
• Paternal power cannot be transferred either. Even a genuine fatherly authority would end with the father and could not pass to a magistrate who is nobody’s parent.

Why the Demolition Had to Come First

• Consent is unintelligible while patriarchalism stands. If men are born into subjection, there is no free equal individual whose agreement could confer or withhold authority.
• The First Treatise clears the ground: only after natural subjection is denied can natural freedom become a premise.
• The First Treatise is philosophically the weaker book, a long scriptural refutation of a dead opponent, but it is the load-bearing wall of the argument.

	Filmer	Locke
Origin of authority	Divine grant to Adam, inherited	Consent of free and equal men
Natural condition	Born into subjection	Born free and equal
Model of the state	The family writ large	A family of families — a different kind of thing
Paternal power	Absolute and permanent	Temporary, purposive, expiring at maturity
Basis of property	Adam’s grant and inheritance	Labour
Limits on the ruler	None; a limited sovereign is no sovereign	The ends of the trust; breach dissolves government
Remedy against tyranny	Passive obedience	Resistance and revolution

The Essay: Epistemology and Its Political Consequences

Against Innate Ideas

• The Essay opens by demolishing innate ideas — the doctrine that certain moral and speculative truths are stamped on the mind at birth.
• The arguments are empirical. Universal assent does not exist: children and the mentally impaired assent to nothing, and moral principles vary wildly between societies.
• Universal consent would prove nothing anyway, since it could be explained by common experience rather than innate imprinting.
• The political motive is transparent. Innate ideas are the epistemology of authority — whoever claims privileged access to self-evident truths claims the right to impose them.
• Locke says nearly as much: the doctrine flatters those who would have men take principles on trust and spare themselves the labour of examination.

Tabula Rasa, Sensation and Reflection

• The mind at birth is white paper, void of all characters — the tabula rasa, on which experience writes.
• All knowledge derives from experience, and experience has two channels.
  • Sensation — simple ideas received from external objects: colour, sound, extension, solidity.
  • Reflection — the mind observing its own operations: perceiving, doubting, willing, believing. This internal sense is what saves Locke from crude sensationalism.
• Simple ideas are passively received; complex ideas are actively made by combining, comparing and abstracting. The mind cannot invent a simple idea but composes everything else.
• He separates primary qualities — solidity, extension, figure, motion, number — which are in the object, from secondary qualities — colour, taste, sound — which are powers to produce sensations in us.
• Knowledge is defined narrowly, as perceived agreement between ideas; most of what we live by is not knowledge but probability and judgment.

The Political Consequences

• Toleration follows from fallibilism. If nobody holds truth innately and all knowledge is probable, no magistrate has the certainty persecution would require.
• Education becomes decisive. If character and belief are written by experience, the arrangement of experience makes the man.
• Equality gains an epistemological floor. No class or race is born with better ideas; differences of understanding are differences of experience and application.
• There is no final possession of truth, only continuing inquiry — which makes free discussion a condition of the polity’s functioning rather than a luxury.
• The argument cuts against innate hierarchy of every kind — divine right, aristocratic superiority, priestly authority — each of which rests on knowledge others cannot check.

The Alleged Contradiction with Natural Law

• The obvious objection: if there are no innate ideas, how can there be a law of nature known to all by reason? Critics from Vaughan through Sabine to Laslett pressed it as a flat inconsistency.
• Locke anticipated it and denied the inference. His attack on innate ideas, he insists, does not imply rejecting natural law; the law is knowable by reason, not stamped ready-made on the mind.
• The distinction is between innate and demonstrable. Mathematical truths are not innate either, yet they are certain, and Locke claims moral truths are demonstrable in the same way.
• The label “empiricist” is too blunt for him: his theory retains rationalist elements, and reflection is a creative operation of mind rather than passive intake.
• He is closer to Kant than to the sensationalists who followed him in holding that the mind’s own activity is required for knowledge in the strict sense.
• He is also a deontologist, not a utilitarian. Though he defines good and evil through pleasure and pain, utility for him is the consequence of obedience to moral law, not its ground.

Education and a Minimal Christianity

• Some Thoughts Concerning Education applies the psychology: character is formed by habit, not by precept, and least of all by beating.
• He wants reason addressed to children as rational creatures, health and hardiness first, learning made pleasant, and virtue placed above scholarship.
• The tutor forms an inquiring mind, rather than filling it with received doctrine — the Essay‘s epistemology turned into pedagogy.
• The Reasonableness of Christianity reduces faith’s essentials to a very short list, chiefly acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah, and repentance.
• A minimal creed leaves very little to persecute over. The theology founds the political argument for toleration rather than sitting beside it.
• Locke’s religion is not decoration. That men are God’s property, that natural law is God’s reason, that reason is His candle — the whole normative structure depends on it, and secularising readings lose exactly this.

Human Nature

Enlightened Self-Interest

• Locke’s man is self-interested but not exclusively self-regarding, able to attend to others’ interests without ceasing to look after his own.
• Reason and passion are present in balanced form. Neither is sovereign, and this single adjustment to the Hobbesian picture generates a different politics entirely.
• The operating principle is restraint as prudence: a man who respects others’ life, liberty and property has the best prospect that his own will be respected.
• He is rational, social and moral — but partial whenever his own interest is engaged, and it is that partiality, not wickedness, that finally makes government necessary.
• He is not consistent as Hobbes is consistent. Where Hobbes builds a geometry, Locke argues from common sense — the same temperamental difference that separates Aristotle from Plato.

Every Thinker a Child of His Times

• The biographical explanation is standard and largely sound. Hobbes wrote out of civil war and regicide; Locke wrote as absolutism was defeated by a bloodless settlement.
• The corollary matters: Hobbes’s fear is anarchy, Locke’s fear is tyranny. Each builds the state that guards against the danger he has actually seen.
• Sociability is natural, not contracted. Men are pre-political but not pre-social, drawn into company by obligations of necessity, convenience and inclination.

	Hobbes	Locke
Human nature	Dominated by passion; restless desire of power	Reason and passion balanced; enlightened self-interest
State of nature	State of war — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short	Peace, goodwill, mutual assistance; inconvenient, not warlike
Rights before the state	None — only a right to all things, worth nothing	Natural rights to life, liberty and property
Law	Positive law — command of the sovereign	Natural law — reason, binding on rulers too
Number of contracts	One; society, state and government arise together	Two acts — community, then a fiduciary grant
Status of the ruler	Not a party; beneficiary of a covenant he never signed	Not a party either; a trustee
Rights surrendered	All except self-preservation	Only the executive power of the law of nature
Nature of the state	Absolute and indivisible	Limited, divided, revocable
Right of resistance	Only against a direct threat to one’s life	Full right of revolution on breach of trust
Where liberty lies	In the silence of the laws	In living under law rather than arbitrary will
Descendants	Sovereignty, the modern state, realism	Constitutionalism, rights, liberal democracy

The State of Nature

Free and Equal, but Not Licence

• The state of nature is a state of perfect freedom to order one’s actions and dispose of one’s possessions, within the bounds of the law of nature.
• It is also a state of equality, all power and jurisdiction being reciprocal — equality of jurisdiction, not of talent or wealth.
• “Though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence.” This sentence separates Locke from every reading that makes him a Hobbesian.
• A man may not destroy himself, nor any creature in his possession, except where some nobler use than bare preservation requires it. Freedom is bounded by obligation from the start.
• It is pre-political but not pre-social. Men live in families, hold property, bargain and keep promises; what is missing is common political authority, not society.

The Law of Nature Known by Reason

“Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” — Locke, Second Treatise

• The law of nature is reason, accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to consult it — which is how it binds men who have never met.
• Its content is a duty of non-injury to life, health, liberty and possessions, from which the corresponding rights are derived.
• It obliges positively as well as negatively. Each man must preserve not only himself but, where his own preservation is not at stake, the rest of mankind.
• It binds rulers as much as subjects. It stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators included, and no human sanction is valid against it.
• Locke works within the natural-law tradition running from the Roman lawyers through Aquinas to Hooker, whom he quotes at length — but he transforms what he inherits.

The Theological Grounding

• Nobody may harm another for a reason that is theological, not prudential: men are the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, servants of one sovereign master.
• The decisive phrase is that “they are his property, whose workmanship they are” — made to last during His pleasure and not one another’s.
• This is what makes rights inalienable. A man may not destroy himself or surrender to absolute power, because he does not own himself outright.
• Equality has a theological floor too. Furnished with like faculties and sharing one community of nature, men can have no natural subordination of the kind that exists between men and animals.
• Waldron argues this premise does more work than modern liberals admit — that Locke’s basic equality has no equally robust secular substitute.
• The workmanship model also underwrites property: as God has property in what He makes, a man has property in what he makes, though with weaker title.

The Executive Power of the Law of Nature

• A law without enforcement is no law, so every individual holds the executive power of the law of nature — the right to punish transgressors.
• Locke concedes this is “a very strange doctrine”, and it is the most radical proposition in his system: each man is his own magistrate.
• The power is held equally by all, since nobody in the state of nature has jurisdiction over anybody else and no principle could give it to one man rather than another.
• Punishment serves reparation to the injured and restraint of future offences, and only proportionate punishment is licensed.
• This power is the one thing men actually give up. They surrender not life, liberty or property but the right to be their own judge and executioner — precisely what government then holds.

The State of Nature Is Not the State of War

• Hobbes fuses the two; Locke separates them, and the separation generates the whole difference between the systems.
• The state of nature is men living together by reason, without a common superior having authority to judge between them.
• The state of war is force, or a declared design of force, used without right — arising whenever one man attempts to get another into his absolute power.
• The two are logically independent. War can occur inside a settled civil society; peace can prevail in the state of nature.
• The point is political, not anthropological. If the state of nature were already war, absolute government would be preferable to it — Hobbes’s conclusion. If it is not, a limited government suffices.
• An absolute ruler puts himself in a state of war with his subjects, which is worse than the state of nature: there a man may defend himself against one aggressor, but under absolutism the aggressor commands the law.

The Three Inconveniences

• The state of nature is inconvenient rather than intolerable, and the defects are precisely three, and precisely procedural.
  • No established, settled, known law received by common consent as the standard of right and wrong. Natural law is real but unwritten, and men read it to suit themselves.
  • No known and indifferent judge with authority to determine differences. Men are partial in their own cause — nobody who kills his brother pronounces himself guilty, and no man can be advocate and judge at once.
  • No power to back and support a just sentence. Even a correct judgment fails for want of force behind it.
• The remedy is limited to the defect. Because what is missing is legislative, judicial and executive machinery, that is all government may supply — and this is the derivation of limited government.
• This is the tightest reasoning in the book. Hobbes’s diagnosis of war licenses an unlimited cure; Locke’s diagnosis of inconvenience licenses only a proportionate one.
• The condition is also unstable. Where every man judges his own case, disputes multiply and peace is always in danger of tipping into war, so it must be superseded sooner or later.

Is the State of Nature Historical?

• Locke offers historical illustrations — the beginnings of Rome and Venice, independent princes, men in the woods of America — as if the condition were once actual.
• It is better read as a rational construct: a hypothesis isolating what men owe each other independently of positive law.
• The historical objection is old and not fatal. That no such condition is documented matters only if the argument was meant as anthropology, which it was not.

The Two Contracts and the Trust

The First Contract: Civil Society by Unanimous Consent

• Since men are by nature free, equal and independent, no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. This axiom carries the whole construction.
• The first act is unanimous. Each individual agrees with every other to incorporate into one body politic, quitting his private executive power and pooling it in the community.
• What emerges is civil or political society — a community with a common judge, able to act as one body.
• What men gain is formal recognition and guarantee of rights they already had. The rights are not created by the contract; they are secured by it.
• Unanimity is required only once. Nobody is made a member against his will, but once inside he has agreed to be bound by the community’s decisions.

Majority Rule and Its Justification

“Whoever therefore out of a State of Nature united into a Commonwealth must be understood to give up all the Power necessary to the Ends for which they united into Society, to the majority of the Community.” — Locke, Second Treatise

• A body can move only one way, and must move as the greater force carries it — which among equal wills is the greater number.
• Continued unanimity would be absurd, since illness, absence and business would make agreement impossible and dissolve the community as soon as it formed.
• Majority rule is a consequence of the first contract, not a separate decision: to consent to enter society is to consent to be bound by its majority.
• The step does enormous work and is thinly defended. It converts a unanimous foundation into a majoritarian operation, and it is where the individualist premises begin to strain.
• Note what it licenses. Laslett observed that on these principles even redistributive taxation, and perhaps nationalisation, could be justified by the majority’s regular constitutional consent — holding good even if every property owner were in the minority.

Government as a Trust, Not a Contract

• The community, once formed, appoints a legislative to declare and execute the law of nature. This is the second, distinct act.
• It is not a contract. Locke calls it “only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends” — a trust, and this is the most consequential technical move in the book.
• The government is a trustee, not a party. It has no rights against the people and no independent standing; it holds power for specified purposes only.
• The community is both truster and beneficiary. Ernest Barker and J. W. Gough stressed the legal implication: the beneficiary owes the trustee no duties, which is why the people may judge the trust unilaterally.
• Laslett read the term less technically — as making clear that all acts of governors are limited to the end of government, the good of the governed, and that there is no contract in it at all.
• The payoff is the theory of resistance. A party to a contract in breach would need a third-party judge; a trustee in breach is simply revoked by the beneficiary.
• The commonest error in describing Locke is to say the people contract with the government. They contract with each other; government holds a trust.

	Contract (Hobbes)	Trust (Locke)
Parties	Subjects with each other	Individuals with each other, in the first act only
Ruler’s status	Beneficiary of a covenant he did not sign	Trustee, not a party at all
Source of power	Transfer of right by every subject	Delegated and fiduciary, revocable
Can the ruler act unjustly?	No — party to nothing, so he breaches nothing	Yes — he can breach the trust
Who judges breach	Nobody	The people, as beneficiaries
Remedy	None, save a direct threat to life	Dissolution of the government

Analytically Distinct, Not Temporally Distinct

• The scheme is often taught as two dated events — first society, then government.
• Brian Nelson’s correction is the right one: the two contracts are analytically rather than temporally distinct, two logically separable moments in a single act of founding.
• The distinction establishes a proposition about dependence, not about chronology: society does not depend on government for its existence and can survive government’s dissolution.
• This is what makes revolution safe in Locke’s system. Because the community was constituted by a separate logical act, removing the government leaves it standing.
• Hobbes cannot have this. His single covenant creates sovereign and society together, so destroying the sovereign returns men to war.

Express and Tacit Consent

• Express consent is a deliberate explicit undertaking — the act by which a man becomes a full member of a commonwealth, perpetually and indispensably.
• Tacit consent covers everyone else. Whoever enjoys any part of the dominions of a government — owning land, lodging for a week, travelling the highway — thereby consents to obey its laws.
• The obligations differ. Express consent makes a member; tacit consent binds only while the benefit is enjoyed, and the tacit consenter remains free to leave.
• Locke needs both. Without tacit consent almost nobody has consented and the theory legitimises nothing; with it, consent becomes so easy to give that it certifies almost anything.
• Inheritance is the hidden hinge. A son who takes his father’s estate takes it on the state’s terms, so property binds each generation to the last — Locke’s answer to Filmer on future generations.

The Problems with Tacit Consent

• The circularity objection. As Plamenatz put it, if only consent creates a duty of obedience, you are too ready to conclude that whatever creates that duty must be consent — “We consent to obey by obeying. Obedience creates the obligation to obey. But this is absurd.”
• The exit objection. Tacit consent is real only if refusal is possible; for a propertyless labourer with nowhere to go, staying is not a choice.
• The vagueness objection. Dunn argued that consent is a formal component in the argument’s logical structure, not a practical criterion for particular cases — it says what would legitimise authority without telling us whether any authority is legitimate.
• The sufficiency objection. Even where consent creates a legitimate society, it does not make every particular act of that society’s authority obligatory.
• Simmons concludes that walking a highway or inheriting land cannot amount to the deliberate voluntary alienation of rights consent requires — pushing Locke’s premises towards philosophical anarchism, a conclusion Locke never drew.

Natural Rights

Rights Before the State

• Locke is the first to give a systematic theory of natural rights, and its whole point is to limit the state.
• Nature, not the state, is the source. Rights derive from the law of nature, which is God’s reason, and are therefore prior to and independent of political authority.
• The trio is life, liberty and property — “lives, liberties and estates”, for which Locke uses the general name property.
• They are inalienable. No rational man would transfer them, since they are the conditions of his existence; and he could not if he wished, being God’s workmanship rather than his own absolute owner.
• The state has no authority to touch them. It is duty-bound to protect them, which is the only reason it exists — hence the minimal state and the night-watchman description of its role.
• Every fundamental right is a natural right; the converse does not hold. A constitutional catalogue selects and enforces some natural rights; it does not exhaust them.

Where Locke Sits Among the Theories of Rights

Theory	Source of rights	Leading names	Status of natural rights
Customary	Custom and tradition stabilised by usage	Historical school	Rights grow; abstract ones are illusions
Legal / positivist	The state; no right unless recognised	Hobbes, Bentham	“Nonsense upon stilts” — natural rights are power, not right
Natural — contractarian	Nature and reason, secured by contract	Locke	Foundational; the state exists to protect them
Natural — teleological	The purpose of human life; dignity	Paine	Real, but the contract is a clog on progress
Conservative	Historical development; inherited liberties	Burke	Abstract rights are dangerous; concrete inherited ones real
Libertarian	Self-ownership and just acquisition	Nozick	Absolute side-constraints on all state action
Communitarian	Membership of a community	Sandel, Taylor	The unencumbered rights-bearer is a fiction

• Bentham’s attack is the sharpest. Natural rights are unreal and ill-founded, “nonsense upon stilts”, an invention of fanatics, and “terroristic language” — because demanding of the state what it cannot deliver invites anarchy.
• Burke objected from the right, praising the settlement of 1688 for reasserting the customary rights of Englishmen and condemning 1789 for acting on abstract rights of man.
• Paine shares Locke’s conclusion and rejects his method: the contract is eternally binding and therefore a clog on the wheel of progress, since every generation must be free to think and act for itself.
• Dworkin’s restatement that “rights are trumps” is Lockean in effect — rights take precedence over general welfare, and courts may strike down even democratically enacted legislation that violates them.
• Hohfeld’s scheme of privileges, claim-rights, powers and immunities supplies the analytical apparatus Locke’s undifferentiated “natural right” lacked, and exposes how much work that single term was doing.

The Theory of Property

This is the most examined and most attacked chapter Locke wrote. Its ambition is to show that private property arises before government and without anyone’s permission — which answers Filmer and simultaneously puts property beyond the state’s reach.

Self-Ownership: The Foundation

“Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” — Locke

• Self-ownership is the axiom. Whatever else is uncertain, a man’s title to his own body and its exertions is not.
• Labour is therefore already private property before anything else is appropriated — a privately owned instrument for converting common things into private ones.
• The proprietary language is deliberate. Locke defines the person in terms of ownership, and it is exactly this move that Macpherson later fastened on.
• There is a tension with the theology: if men are God’s property they cannot be their own absolute proprietors, so Locke uses self-ownership while denying its unlimited form.

Mixing Labour

• In the beginning all things were common, given by God to mankind. Locke accepts Filmer’s starting point and defeats him from inside it.
• Common ownership is useless. Nothing can be eaten or used until taken out of the common stock, and if universal consent were required mankind would have starved.
• The mechanism: whatever a man removes from the state nature left it in, he has mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, thereby making it his property.
• The apple is the standard illustration. An apple on the tree feeds nobody; gathering it makes it the gatherer’s.
• Land works the same way. As much land as a man tills, plants, improves and can use the product of is his — he encloses it from the common by his labour.
• This is the ancestor of the labour theory of value in classical and Marxian economics, though Locke’s claim is about title rather than the magnitude of value.

The Three Limitations

• The labour limitation. Only that is justly appropriated with which a man has actually mixed his labour — which excludes conquest, decree and mere declaration, and is aimed squarely at feudal and royal title.
• The sufficiency limitation. Appropriation is legitimate “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others” — the enough-and-as-good proviso.
• The spoilage limitation. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil, so a man may take only what he can use before it perishes; whatever rots in his hands he has robbed from others.
• A fourth constraint sits alongside them — the duty of charity. Locke holds that a man in extreme want has a title to another’s surplus, which is a real restriction on absolute dominion.
• The limitations are natural, not political. They bind in the state of nature before any legislature exists, which is what makes property pre-political.

The Tacit Consent to Money

Everything turns on this step, and every serious controversy about Locke lives inside it.

• Money is durable and does not spoil. Gold, silver and diamonds may be hoarded without injury to anyone, because nothing perishes uselessly in their hands.
• Men agreed by tacit and voluntary consent to put a value on money — an agreement made outside and prior to government, by the same mechanism that binds men elsewhere in Locke.
• The spoilage limit is thereby dissolved. A man may sell his surplus for gold and accumulate without limit while breaking no natural law, since gold never rots.
• The sufficiency limit is dissolved by the productivity argument. Enclosed land yields, on Locke’s estimate, ten or a hundred times what the same acreage yields in common — so the appropriator leaves others better off in absolute terms while leaving them less land.
• The conclusion is stated plainly: men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth — by consent, outside government, and without violating natural law.
• This is where the theory changes character. A doctrine that began by limiting acquisition ends by licensing unlimited accumulation and legitimising inequality in advance of any political decision about it.

The provisos are the moral architecture of Locke’s property theory, and the tacit consent to money removes them without repealing them. That single move is the entire quarrel about Locke.

“The Industrious and Rational”

• The summarising formula is that God gave the world to men in common “to the use of the industrious and rational — and labour was to be his title to it”, not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.
• The sentence carries a moral sorting of mankind. The industrious and enterprising acquired; the idle, quarrelsome and improvident did not, and their poverty is thereby explained as desert.
• God made the world’s goods to be used, not wasted — a Protestant work ethic converted into a property title, and the theological warrant for accumulation.
• The formula does two kinds of work at once: it defends the improving English landowner against feudal claims, and the English settler against the non-cultivating occupant.
• It is not a neutral description of who happens to own things. It supplies a criterion by which non-owners can be told their condition reflects their character.

The American and Colonial Context

• The chapter is saturated with America. “In the beginning all the world was America” — the New World is Locke’s living example of the state of nature.
• Amerindian land use is treated as non-appropriative. Hunting, gathering and shifting cultivation neither enclose nor improve, so the land remains “waste” and open to appropriation by whoever will cultivate it.
• The consequence follows automatically: unenclosed land is vacant, and the settler who cultivates acquires title without any need for the occupant’s consent.
• Locke’s day job makes this concrete rather than incidental. He was secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and a commissioner of trade and plantations while composing the argument.
• The productivity claim does colonial work. A king of a large fruitful American territory, Locke writes, is fed and clad worse than an English day labourer — from which the superiority of enclosure, and the benefit to the dispossessed, are inferred.

What “Preservation of Property” Means

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.” — Locke

• The sentence is routinely misread. Locke uses “property” here in his broad sense — “lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property” — so the phrase means the whole bundle of natural rights.
• The narrow reading is not wrong either. He does sometimes use the term strictly, and estate is the most fully theorised of the three.
• Property in the broad sense makes Locke a constitutionalist; property in the narrow sense makes him the philosopher of the propertied. The text sustains both, and this ambiguity is the entry point for every hostile reading.
• The state protects property; it does not limit it. No law may take a man’s estate without his consent — in a settled commonwealth, the majority’s consent through the legislature, which is what makes taxation lawful and arbitrary seizure not.

The Night-Watchman State

• If the state’s whole purpose is to secure pre-existing rights, its functions are protective and nothing more — the classic night-watchman state.
• Its work is negative: police, courts, defence, enforcement of contracts. It does not shape character, promote a religion, or redistribute.
• This is the germ of classical liberalism and laissez-faire, passing to Adam Smith, to Bentham, and in the twentieth century to Nozick.
• Early liberalism took a further step Locke did not. Property came to be treated as evidence of a stake in the state and of political capacity — the property qualification for the franchise.
• Modern liberalism reversed it. J. S. Mill, having first defended security of property, came to deny it was absolute or sacrosanct, urged heavy restriction of inheritance and bequest, criticised private property in land as the original inheritance of all mankind, and pleaded for the taxation of rent.
• T. H. Green completed the turn: property is an instrument for exercising moral freedom, and when an unrestrained right to it hinders freedom in society, reasonable restrictions follow.

The Social-Democratic Answer to Lockean Property

• L. T. Hobhouse, in Liberalism, demonstrates the social origin of property: it is the organised force of society that maintains owners’ rights by protecting them against thieves and depredators.
• The inference cuts against Locke directly. If society secures the title, society has a claim on the holding, and property cannot be a purely pre-political entitlement.
• R. H. Tawney, in The Acquisitive Society, deprecates the tyranny of “functionless property” — ownership yielding income without performing any social service — and urges the subordination of property to function.
• Harold Laski, in A Grammar of Politics, argues on moral grounds for strict limitation of the right of inheritance: no property is justified unless it results from the performance of socially useful duties.
• All three reverse Locke’s order of derivation. He derives property from labour and then lets money detach the two; the social-democratic answer re-attaches them and makes function, not first appropriation, the test of a just holding.

“Where There Is No Law There Is No Liberty”

The Passage

“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom… where there is no law, there is no freedom.” — Locke

• The claim is that law is the condition of liberty, not its opposite — inverting the intuitive picture of freedom as absence of rules.
• The reasoning: freedom is not liberty for every man to do as he lists, but freedom from the arbitrary will of another, and only a settled standing rule secures that.
• Liberty means having a rule to live by, common to everyone, made by the legislative power erected in the society — and not being subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of anybody else.
• In the state of nature, natural law makes liberty possible, because reason taught each man not to harm the others before any government existed.
• After the state exists, positive law must conform to natural law. A statute depriving a man of life, liberty or property has no validity — it cannot be reasonable, fair or just.
• This is the germ of due process: law must satisfy a standard of reasonableness external to the legislature that made it.

Why Locke’s Formula Is Not Hobbes’s

Both men can be quoted saying liberty is bound up with law. They mean opposite things.

	Hobbes	Locke
What “law” means	Positive law — the sovereign’s command	Natural law and reason, which positive law must reflect
Law and liberty	Law restricts liberty	Law preserves and enlarges liberty
Where liberty resides	In the silence of the laws	In living under a settled known rule
Can law be unjust?	No — the command defines justice	Yes — a law against natural law is void
Remedy against a bad law	Obedience	Resistance
Kind of liberty	Negative — absence of external impediment	Freedom from arbitrary will, secured by law

• The rule of law rather than of men is the real content of Locke’s claim, which is why he belongs to the constitutional tradition rather than the libertarian one when the two diverge.
• The corollary is a demand on citizens: to enjoy liberty a man must himself be reasonable, because a people incapable of reason cannot sustain a government of laws.

The Powers and Limits of Government

Legislative Supremacy

• The legislative is the supreme power of the commonwealth, sacred and unalterable where the community has placed it, and no other body’s edict has the force of law without its sanction.
• Supremacy is not sovereignty in the Hobbesian sense. It is supreme among the organs of government while remaining a delegated fiduciary power beneath the community.
• It is supreme only while the government subsists. The community’s superior power to remove or alter it takes effect only once the government is dissolved.

The Four Limits on the Legislative

• Government by promulgated, established, standing laws, the same for rich and poor, favourite and countryman — not by extemporary arbitrary decrees.
• No end but the people’s good. The law of nature stands as an eternal rule to legislators as much as to others, and no human sanction is valid against it.
• No taking of property without consent — the consent of the majority, given directly or through representatives. This is the constitutional origin of no taxation without representation.
• No transfer of the law-making power to other hands. Being itself only delegated, the legislative cannot pass it on — a prohibition on abdication that anticipates modern doctrine against excessive delegation.

Executive, Federative, Prerogative

Power	Function	Character
Legislative	Makes standing law	Supreme but fiduciary; intermittent — need not always sit
Executive	Applies and enforces law, including what Montesquieu later called the judicial power	Subordinate and accountable; must always be in being
Federative	War, peace, leagues, alliances — all dealings outside the commonwealth	Not reducible to antecedent standing laws; left to prudence
Prerogative	Acting for the public good without the prescription of law, and sometimes against it	Discretionary; justified only by the good it produces

• Executive and federative are distinct but must be held in the same hands, since dividing the community’s force between two independent commands invites disorder.
• The federative power is genuinely different in kind, because foreign affairs turn on the unpredictable intentions of foreign powers and cannot be reduced to standing rules.
• Prerogative is Locke’s most dangerous concession — a power in the executive to act for the public good where law is silent, slow, or would do harm if applied.
• His justification is practical: legislatures are slow and cannot foresee everything, and rigid application of a general rule can defeat the purpose it was made for.
• The danger is obvious. A power to act against the law, judged by the man exercising it, is exactly the arbitrary discretion the rest of the book exists to abolish.
• His only safeguard is the same as everywhere else — the people judge, and the appeal is to heaven. A remedy that drastic is no restraint on ordinary misuse, which is why later constitutions substituted justiciable limits and emergency provisions.

Separation of Powers — What Locke Did and Did Not Say

• Locke gave the doctrine its first modern statement, for the modern reason: it is too great a temptation for those who make laws also to execute them, and thereby exempt themselves from obedience.
• He divided power three ways — legislative, executive, federative — but not into the familiar modern three.
• The judiciary is not a separate branch for him. Adjudication is folded into the executive; what Montesquieu later isolated as the judicial power is, in the Second Treatise, part of law-enforcement.
• The powers are not co-equal. The legislative is supreme and the executive answerable to it — a doctrine of subordination, closer to parliamentary government than to checks and balances.
• Montesquieu completed the scheme, substituting the judiciary for the federative, making the branches co-ordinate, and turning separation into mutual restraint — from which the American constitution took its structure.

Sovereignty: Vaughan, Barker, Sabine

• C. E. Vaughan concluded that Locke had no theory of sovereignty at all, and that the true sovereign of civil government is the individual.
• Ernest Barker made the softer version: Locke had no clear view of the nature and residence of sovereignty.
• The criticism identifies sovereignty with one of its variants — the Hobbesian and Austinian version conceiving it as the will of an absolute illimitable power.
• There is another tradition, running through Aquinas and Hooker, in which sovereignty is authority rather than force and is bounded by a higher law without ceasing to be authority. This is the bedrock of constitutional government, and it is Locke’s.
• Locke does acknowledge an ultimate power in the community to save itself from the designs of anybody, even of its legislators — later called popular sovereignty.
• Sabine’s structural criticism is the most penetrating: the Two Treatises contains four levels of authority — individual, community, legislative, executive — each derivative from the one before, yet Locke attributes a kind of absoluteness to each.
• This can be read as a virtue. He was presenting a phenomenology of institutions without reducing everything to a single ultimate entity — neither Hobbes’s fictitious corporation nor Hegel’s concrete universal.

Dissolution and the Right to Revolution

Dissolution of Government Is Not Dissolution of Society

• This distinction carries the entire safety of Locke’s doctrine, and it answers the standing objection that a right of revolution licenses chaos.
• Society is dissolved only by foreign conquest, which shatters the community itself and returns men to the state of nature.
• Government is dissolved by breach of trust, and when it is, the community remains intact and simply resumes the power to constitute a new legislative.
• Men therefore do not fall back into anarchy when they overthrow a government. They fall back into a functioning political community holding an unexercised constituent power.

When Government Dissolves

• When the legislative is altered — the prince substitutes arbitrary will for the laws, prevents the legislature from assembling and acting freely, or alters the electors or the ways of election without consent.
• When the executive abandons its charge, so that laws already made cannot be executed and the society falls into confusion.
• When either delivers the people to a foreign power, betraying the whole purpose for which the community was formed.
• When those in authority act contrary to the trust — invading the property of the subject, or attempting arbitrary power over lives, liberties or estates.
• When the legislative delegates its law-making power, since a delegated power cannot itself be delegated.

Who Shall Judge?

• The objection is ancient: if the people may judge whether the trust is broken, no government is ever safe.
• Locke’s answer is unambiguous — “the people shall be judge.” The trustee cannot try his own breach, and the beneficiary must decide whether the trust has been kept.
• He treats the alternative as absurd. To deny the people judgment is to make the injured party accept the aggressor’s account, which is the condition of slaves.
• The judgment is collective, not individual. Locke speaks of the body of the people, or the majority, rather than of any private man taking up arms.
• Who would judge in practice is left unresolved. Plamenatz argued Locke assumed, like nearly all his contemporaries, that resistance would rest with the educated and propertied — the only part of the community he thought capable of responsible judgment.
• Ashcraft flatly disagreed, finding a far more radical spirit and summarising Locke as holding that resistance to tyranny is everyone’s business.

The Appeal to Heaven

• Where there is no common judge on earth between people and a government that has broken trust, the only remedy is an appeal to heaven — which means an appeal to force.
• The phrase is borrowed from Jephthah in the Book of Judges. It is not mysticism: it says the dispute is beyond adjudication and must be settled by the parties.
• Each man answers for the appeal to God, which is a genuine restraint in Locke’s own terms — nobody invokes heaven lightly for a grievance he knows to be trivial.

The Inversion: The Ruler Is the Rebel

• Locke’s sharpest move turns the charge of rebellion back on the government.
• Rebellion is opposition not to persons but to authority — and authority derives from the constitution and laws of the government.
• Whoever brings back the state of war is the rebel — the ruler who breaks the trust and uses force without right, not the subjects who resist him.
• Those who resist are restorers of legality, acting to reinstate the constitution the ruler has abandoned.
• The word “revolution” is barely used. Locke speaks of resistance, dissolution, and the people resuming their power — a restorative vocabulary, not a transformative one.

The Safeguards Against Disorder

• People are not easily got out of their old forms, and suffer long before they act.
• Great mistakes and mismanagements will be borne without mutiny. Revolution does not follow from ordinary bad government.
• Only “a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way” makes the case, because it shows design rather than error.
• The counterfactual argument is the strongest. The doctrine of resistance is the best fence against rebellion, since it is the ruler’s lawlessness that provokes disorder, and a right known to exist deters its own exercise.
• The risk of licensing resistance is smaller than the risk of unaccountable power — the whole utilitarian defence of the doctrine, made two centuries before utilitarianism.

Revolutionary or Conservative?

• Sabine’s verdict is that despite his insistence on the right of revolution Locke was not a revolutionary, being conservative by temperament and treating revolution as an extreme remedy.
• The change he defended was itself conservative — a change of monarch, with the social and property order untouched.
• The Laslett dating cuts the other way. A man writing in secret in 1681 for a faction planning armed resistance is not the apologist of an accomplished settlement.
• Both are true of different aspects of the man. The doctrine is radical and the temperament cautious, and the text carries both — which is why readings of him swing so violently.
• His influence was radical in any case. The American Declaration of Independence reproduces his structure — self-evident equality, unalienable rights, government by consent, and a right to alter or abolish a government destructive of those ends.
• Jefferson, Paine, the French revolutionaries and Rousseau all drew on him, and the general principle survived every particular use: constitutional limits without a remedy are not limits at all.

Toleration

Civil Interest Against the Care of Souls

• The commonwealth is a society constituted only for procuring, preserving and advancing men’s civil interests — life, liberty, health, and the possession of outward things.
• The magistrate’s jurisdiction is bounded by that list. All civil power is confined to promoting those things and cannot extend to the salvation of souls.
• “The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men.” No such authority is granted by God, and none is given by the consent of men.
• Three arguments carry the case.
  • From authority — no commission for the care of souls appears in scripture, and none could be conferred by a contract nobody would make.
  • From the nature of belief — the magistrate’s power is force, and force compels outward conformity but cannot produce the inward conviction that alone saves.
  • From fallibility — magistrates differ in religion across the world, so obeying them would make salvation depend on the accident of birthplace.
• The third argument connects directly to the Essay. A theory of knowledge that denies certainty to anyone denies it to the persecutor first.

The Church as a Voluntary Society

• “A church I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord” for public worship in a manner they judge acceptable to God.
• Membership is free and so is exit. No man is born a member of any church, and anyone may leave as freely as he entered.
• Church discipline is real but limited. A church may admonish and finally excommunicate, but excommunication may touch no civil right, no property, no liberty.
• This is the intellectual foundation of the separation of church and state, and the transmission line from Locke to the American First Amendment.

The Exclusions

Locke’s toleration is famous, and it is also bounded, and the boundaries are as instructive as the doctrine.

• Atheists are not to be tolerated. “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”
  • The exclusion is contractual rather than theological. Locke’s system runs on promise-keeping, and he believed the obligation to keep faith required a divine guarantor.
  • It is nonetheless a self-inflicted wound. A doctrine grounded in the impossibility of coercing belief cannot consistently coerce disbelief.
• Those who “deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince” are not to be tolerated — a formula everyone understood to mean Roman Catholics, taken to owe allegiance to the Pope.
  • The ground is again civil: the objection is to a foreign jurisdiction inside the commonwealth, not to the Mass.
  • The context is the Exclusion Crisis itself, in which a Catholic succession was the live threat. The exclusion is Locke’s politics showing through his philosophy.
• No opinion contrary to human society, or to the moral rules necessary for its preservation, is to be tolerated — the general clause under which both exclusions sit.
• He does not exclude Jews or Muslims, a strikingly wide position for the seventeenth century and further evidence that the two exclusions are political rather than religious in motive.

The Reply from Proast

• Jonas Proast made the strongest contemporary objection: force cannot directly produce belief, but it works “indirectly, and at a distance” — penalties can make men attend to arguments they would otherwise ignore.
• The objection is serious because it accepts Locke’s psychology and denies only his conclusion, and it drove him to write two further letters.
• Locke’s better reply is the fallibility argument, which does not depend on the psychology: even if force worked, the magistrate cannot know that the religion he enforces is the true one.
• Modern scholarship is divided on whether he ever answered Proast satisfactorily, some holding that the later letters shift decisively from rationality to human fallibility.

Locke as Individualist and as Father of Liberalism

Methodological and Normative Individualism

• Methodological individualism builds political theory on the individual as the unit of analysis. Locke does this throughout — society, government and obligation are all explained from the properties of individuals.
• Normative individualism holds that the individual’s claims have priority over the collective’s. Locke qualifies on five counts.
  • A theory of natural rights the community did not confer and cannot withdraw.
  • Consent as the basis of authority.
  • No original powers in government — everything it has is delegated.
  • A right to revolt when the delegation is abused.
  • A strong right over property, the material form of individual independence.

“An Individualist Out and Out”

• The phrase captures a contrast with Hobbes. Hobbes is the greatest of individualists in his premises and an absolutist in his conclusions — as Macpherson put it, he begins as an individualist and concludes as an absolutist.
• Locke remains an individualist throughout. He nowhere justifies absolutism, and his conclusions are as individualist as his premises — hence “out and out”, meaning consistently, from beginning to end.
• The individual in Locke is more enlightened than the individual in Hobbes, which is precisely why Locke can afford a limited state where Hobbes cannot.
• Sabine’s counterpoint is worth keeping: even Hobbesian absolutism is derivative of individualism, created to protect the individual’s right to life. The two differ on how much state that protection requires.
• Vaughan called Locke a “prince of individualists”, while Willmoore Kendall read him against the grain as a collectivist of Rousseau’s brand on the strength of the majority-rule doctrine — a measure of how far the interpretations spread.

Father of Liberalism — the Claim and Its Limits

• The title is deserved structurally. Locke supplies liberalism’s four load-bearing ideas: natural rights, government by consent, limited and accountable power, and religious toleration.
• He does not supply liberalism’s theory of liberty. He states the natural right and moves on; the elaborate account of freedom of thought, speech, association and individuality is Mill’s, two centuries later.
• He does not supply liberal democracy. He assumed a propertied electorate, said nothing for universal suffrage, and made the legislature supreme rather than the people.
• His liberalism carries conservative and radical elements together. Its original inspiration is natural law and divine reason in the classical tradition; its modern reception discarded the theology and kept the rights.
• The affinity modern liberals claim is purchased at a price. Rawls, Dworkin and above all Nozick profess a Lockean descent only by ignoring the religious frame that gave Locke’s rights their foundation.
• Raymond Polin’s corrective is sharpest: for Locke, freedom is the means God gave rational creatures to incorporate themselves into the order of the world, and freedom is always correlative with order and obligation.

Criticisms

Macpherson: Possessive Individualism

• C. B. Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism is the most influential attack ever made on Locke, and it must be stated in its own terms before it is answered.
• The core proposition: the individual is conceived as the absolute natural proprietor of his own capacities, owing nothing to society for them, free to use them in search of satisfactions provided he harms no one.
• Society becomes a device for protecting proprietors and regulating exchange, rather than a moral community with claims of its own.
• The property argument is read as an ideological operation. Locke states limits on appropriation and then removes each of them, arriving at a defence of unlimited accumulation that looks reasoned to rather than assumed.
• Wage labour is the hidden step. Once a man may buy another’s labour, the labour title licenses appropriating the product of other men’s labour — and Locke’s remark that a man owns the labour of his servant and his horse is the evidence.
• The right of bequest is a second departure, which Macpherson reads as Locke abandoning the medieval view for the bourgeois one, since inheritance has nothing to do with mixing one’s own labour.
• The conclusion: Locke not only justifies unequal property but approves unlimited individual appropriation, making him the ideologue of market society, of possessive individualism, and of what Macpherson called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The Differential Rationality Thesis

• Macpherson’s most contentious claim is that Locke’s society contains two classes with two different rational capacities.
• The propertied are fully rational — able to govern themselves by natural law, to accumulate, to deliberate on public affairs.
• The labouring poor are not. Locke’s own writings on the poor treat them as incapable of a fully rational life, driven by immediate necessity, fit to be set to work but not to deliberate.
• The consequence is a differentiated citizenship. Both classes are in the state, but only one is genuinely of it — which lets Locke hold universal natural equality and a propertied political order at once without noticing the contradiction.
• This yields the famous verdict that it is hard indeed to turn the Lockean doctrine into any kind of unqualified democratic theory — the equality is formal while the political capacity it grounds is not.
• This is the most serious charge against Locke’s democratic credentials, and why “father of liberalism” and “father of democracy” cannot both be said of him without qualification.

The Replies to Macpherson

• Martin Seliger argues the limitations on property are never rendered illusory, by money or by landed accumulation. Property is the prototype of natural rights, and natural rights are freedoms bounded by positive law in all spheres — so positive law may certainly contain accumulation.
• Richard Ashcraft makes the historical objection: no contemporary read Locke as Macpherson does; Locke personally held the religious beliefs Macpherson treats as a sop to lesser minds; and he wrote for revolutionary action and religious dissent — minority positions, unattractive to the propertied men he supposedly served.
• Ashcraft’s second objection is methodological. Macpherson never supplied the historical evidence that seventeenth-century England was the market society his model requires — and the worse the model fits, the harder it is to attribute its purposes to Locke.
• Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, Hans Aarsleff and John Dunn press one point: Macpherson’s reading overlooks the overriding role of natural law and the common good it implies. Locke was too much a medievalist and too much a believer to espouse cut-throat accumulation.
• A. John Simmons concludes that Locke condemns covetousness and nowhere defends unlimited accumulation, but neither treats money and the inequality it creates as contrary to God’s will. Locke occupies “the middle ground”, calling neither for unfettered accumulation nor for radical redistribution.
• Laslett’s verdict is bluntest: it is gratuitous to turn Locke’s property doctrine into the classic doctrine of the spirit of capitalism, and even the minutest control of property by political authority is reconcilable with the Two Treatises.
• The fair assessment sits between the camps. A doctrine of differential rationality cannot securely be attributed to Locke; but the whole tenor of his argument favours large owners over ordinary citizens, and that can hardly be denied.

Strauss and Cox: The Covert Hobbesian

• Leo Strauss and Richard Cox argue that Locke’s theory is a restatement of Hobbes in more palatable language — the same egoistic psychology, disguised for a public that would not swallow the original.
• Their evidence is Locke’s dual account of the state of nature: a condition described as peaceful which, once passions and scarcity operate, turns out to be a state of war whose only remedy is civil society.
• The charge is not mere inconsistency but concealment — that Locke wrote esoterically, with a hidden meaning beneath a respectable surface, his natural-law language covering a secular self-interested doctrine.
• The Straussian reading also makes rights primary and duty secondary, the reverse of the natural-law reading in which duty comes first and rights are derived.
• The objections are strong. The reading is highly selective, goes against Locke’s clearly expressed opinions, and has been rejected by Aarsleff, Ashcraft, Seliger and Polin, none of whom had an esoteric method to defend.
• Dunn’s objection is the most damaging: Locke’s religious commitments were sincere and pervasive, and a reading that treats them as a mask must explain away his entire private life and correspondence.

Laslett and the Historical Correction

• If the book precedes 1688, Locke is not an apologist, and the charge that he wrote to dignify an accomplished fact collapses.
• It also reframes the property chapter. A text produced in the Exclusion Crisis intervenes in a quarrel about arbitrary taxation and royal seizure; it is not a general charter for capital.
• His edition of the Two Treatises remains the standard, and the dating debate it opened — continued by Ashcraft and Dunn — is now part of the subject rather than a footnote to it.

Dunn: The Religious Locke and the Consent Problem

• John Dunn’s The Political Thought of John Locke offers a reading diametrically opposed to Macpherson’s: Lockean theory is the elaboration of Calvinist social values in the absence of a terrestrial theological authority.
• Locke saw the rationality of human existence as dependent on the truths of religion — the whole enterprise he spent his life vindicating rests on a theological foundation.
• Dunn’s provocation is that this makes Locke unusable for us. His conception of political agency depends for its structure and stability on a personal relation between the individual and the deity, and so can scarcely ground modern political identities.
• On consent he is equally deflationary. The notion is a key term in the argument’s expository structure but exerts no precise control over its application to particular cases in the world.
• Consent is necessary for legitimacy but not sufficient for obligation. That a society is legitimately founded says nothing about whether any particular act of its authority binds.
• The combined effect is to historicise Locke — to make him a seventeenth-century Christian thinker rather than a proto-modern liberal, which is exactly what most liberal appropriations need him not to be.

Tully: The Rival Reading of the Property Chapter

• James Tully offers the most sustained alternative to Macpherson on the fifth chapter, and it inverts almost every conclusion.
• The provisos remain binding. Once land becomes scarce, prior appropriations lose their natural justification, and property thereafter requires the consent of political society.
• The workmanship model is the key. Men have property in what they make as God has property in what He makes — a derivative and weaker title, held under a Maker who retains ultimate ownership.
• Property in civil society is therefore conventional, settled by positive law and adjustable by the community, not a natural right the state merely registers.
• The duty of charity survives and is robust: a man in want has a title in another’s surplus, which is incompatible with absolute dominion.
• Tully’s second contribution cuts the other way. In his work on Locke and Aboriginal rights he shows the same theory functioning to delegitimise Amerindian land claims, since indigenous use did not meet Locke’s criteria for appropriation.
• The two halves are not in tension. Locke can be less of a capitalist than Macpherson claimed and more of a coloniser than the liberal tradition admitted.

Plamenatz: Three Logical Defects

• John Plamenatz attacks the property theory on logical rather than ideological grounds, which makes his critique harder to deflect.
• The spoilage limit is either irrelevant or inadequate, since the injunction to let nothing spoil makes sense only under conditions that are in fact rare.
• The right of bequest does not follow. It derives neither from the right to preserve life and liberty nor from the right to set aside what one has mixed labour with — yet Locke tacitly includes it.
• Mixing labour cannot generate exclusivity over time. Even granting a right against those who have not mixed labour, it does not follow that being first confers a right not to share with anyone who mixes his labour later.
• His attack on consent is equally direct — the tacit consent doctrine serves no useful purpose and is dispensable, and reasoning from obedience to consent to obligation is circular.

Nozick: The Lockean Libertarian

• Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is the twentieth century’s most rigorous Lockean revival, written as a libertarian reply to Rawls.
• The entitlement theory of justice has three parts — justice in acquisition, justice in transfer, and rectification of past injustice. A distribution is just if it arose from just steps, whatever pattern it displays.
• Justice is historical, not patterned. Any end-state principle — equality, need, merit — requires continuous interference with liberty to maintain, which is the argument that liberty upsets patterns.
• Rights are side-constraints rather than goals to be maximised: boundaries around persons that may not be crossed even for good outcomes.
• The state is minimal. A night-watchman state confined to protection against force, theft and fraud, and to enforcing contracts, is justified; anything more violates rights.
• The proviso is modernised, not abandoned. Nozick reformulates enough-and-as-good as a requirement that appropriation not worsen the position of others relative to a baseline of non-appropriation — a much weaker test that almost any appropriation passes.
• The lineage is genuine but selective. Nozick keeps self-ownership and the labour title and discards the theology, the natural-law duties and the duty of charity — precisely the elements that constrained Locke’s own conclusions.

Hume: The Demolition of the Original Contract

• David Hume’s essay on the original contract is the most economical destruction of the contractarian enterprise, and it hits Locke squarely.
• The historical claim is false. Almost every government now existing was founded on usurpation or conquest, and its founders never pretended to any consent from the governed.
• The contract is unnecessary. Allegiance is grounded not in a promise but in utility and interest — society could not subsist otherwise, and that is reason enough to obey.
• Promise-keeping and allegiance rest on the same foundation, so deriving the second from the first explains nothing; it takes a step backwards to the same place.
• Tacit consent collapses under the ship analogy. A poor peasant or artisan has no choice of country, no foreign tongue and no means to leave.
  • Telling him he freely consents by remaining is like saying a man carried aboard a vessel while asleep consents to the master’s dominion — when leaving means leaping into the ocean and perishing.
• Even Locke’s defenders concede the force of this, and it is why twentieth-century liberalism replaced actual consent with hypothetical consent — the device Rawls finally supplied.

Rousseau and Marx

• Rousseau accepts the contract form and rejects almost everything Locke does with it.
  • Private property is the origin of inequality, not a natural right — the first man to enclose a piece of ground and call it his own founded civil society and its miseries.
  • Sovereignty is inalienable and cannot be represented. Locke’s representative legislature is, on Rousseau’s principles, a surrender of freedom rather than an exercise of it.
  • The general will replaces the trust. There is no separate government holding power fiduciarily, because the people are the sovereign and not merely its beneficiary.
  • Locke’s contract legitimises existing inequality; Rousseau’s is designed to abolish its political effects.
• Marx attacks the foundation rather than the mechanism.
  • Private property is historical, not natural. It appears with the division of society into antagonistic classes and disappears with them; calling it a natural right is ideology.
  • The state is not a neutral trustee but an instrument, created by the class of property-owners to protect its property — the constitution of modern representative states being in reality the constitution of private property.
  • Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, supplies the anthropological version: property, family and state emerging together with class antagonism.
  • Marxism distinguishes personal from private property, protecting the first as the source of individual security and abolishing only the second, which is an instrument for controlling the lives of others.
  • The Lockean individual is a bourgeois abstraction — the self-image of a particular class in a particular epoch, presented as human nature as such.

Pateman: The Sexual Contract

• Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract is the most important feminist reading, and it turns on what Locke did not defeat in Filmer.
• Locke destroys paternal right and preserves conjugal right. He denies that political power derives from fatherhood but leaves the husband’s authority over the wife standing as natural.
• The wife’s subjection is said to have “a foundation in nature”, so that where the couple disagree the final determination falls to the husband as the abler and stronger.
• Women are not parties to the original contract. The contractors are men, heads of households, and the family is treated as pre-political and outside the scope of consent.
• The sexual contract is therefore prior to the social contract and repressed by it: patriarchy is not abolished but modernised into fraternal patriarchy, men ruling as brothers over a domestic sphere the contract never reaches.
• The public–private distinction is the mechanism. Locating the family outside politics makes women’s subordination invisible to political theory rather than defensible within it.
• The critique is structural, not biographical. The point is not that Locke was personally hostile to women — he was less so than most contemporaries — but that contract theory requires a domain of non-consensual relations to rest on.

Colonialism: Parekh, Mehta, Arneil — and Locke’s Own Record

This criticism has grown most in the last three decades, and it has two parts: what the theory does, and what the man did. Both must be stated plainly.

• Barbara Arneil, in John Locke and America, argues the property chapter is a defence of English colonial appropriation, written by a colonial administrator against competing Amerindian, Spanish and French claims.
• The mechanism is the definition of appropriation. Because title requires enclosure and cultivation, Amerindian hunting, gathering and shifting agriculture generate no property, and their lands remain legally vacant waste open to any cultivator.
• James Tully shows the same point from the other side: Locke’s criteria erase indigenous forms of property and government, so that peoples with functioning systems of land use and authority are classified as living in a state of nature.
• Bhikhu Parekh locates the flaw one level deeper, in the anthropology. Locke defines man by reason and then fills reason with a culturally specific content — accumulation, industry, material improvement — so that peoples not sharing those drives appear defective and not fully human.
• Parekh’s second move is the crucial one. Locke separates interpersonal equality from political equality: Amerindians hold rights as individuals but no collective claim to self-determination, lacking centralised sovereignty and written law. Dispossession is thereby framed as benevolent improvement.
• Uday Singh Mehta, in Liberalism and Empire, argues this is no accident of application but an exclusionary impulse internal to liberal theory. Locke’s universal capacity of reason is in practice conditioned by convention, habit and upbringing — and Some Thoughts Concerning Education shows how much social formation the abstract individual requires.
• The result is a theory universal in premises, selective in reach. The anthropological minimum for full political capacity is set at a level only some societies meet, and the gap is the space in which empire operates.
• Locke’s personal record is part of the record and should not be softened.
  • He held shares in the Royal African Company, which held the English monopoly of the Atlantic slave trade, and invested in the Bahama Adventurers.
  • He was secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and worked on the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, whose article 110 declares that every freeman shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.
  • The extent of his authorship of that document is genuinely disputed — he may have transcribed it as Shaftesbury’s secretary rather than composed it — but he was demonstrably involved in producing and later amending it. The dispute is about degree, not about involvement.
  • He served on the Board of Trade in the 1690s, when English colonial and commercial policy was being consolidated.
• The tension with the text is stark. The First Treatise opens by calling slavery “so vile and miserable an estate of man” that it is hardly conceivable an Englishman should plead for it — written by a man with money in the slave trade.
• His theory permits slavery in one case only: a captive taken in a just war who has forfeited his life by aggression and may be enslaved in lieu of death. Hereditary chattel slavery fails that test entirely, since the children of captives committed no aggression.
• The honest conclusion is neither exoneration nor dismissal. Locke’s principles condemn the institutions he participated in, and his property theory supplied arguments that dispossession used. Both are true, and a note reporting only one of them is not reporting Locke.

Communitarian Criticism

• The Lockean individual is unencumbered — self-defining, autonomous, prior to society, with capacities he owes nobody. Communitarians deny such a person exists.
• Individuals are constituted by their communities. Identity, values and the very conception of well-being come from a social and cultural inheritance, not from a pre-social act of self-definition.
• The charge is abstraction and ahistoricism. The state of nature and its rights-bearing inhabitants correspond to no actual human being in any actual society.
• Michael Sandel, in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, urges abandoning the liberal politics of rights for a politics of the common good, denying that the self can be prior to its ends.
• The practical implication is differentiated rights. If membership constitutes the person, rights may properly attach to people as members of communities and not only as abstract individuals — the theoretical basis of multicultural and group-differentiated claims.
• The reply available to Locke is that his individual is a normative construction, not a sociological description — a device for asking what a person is owed independently of what his society grants him. That is a real defence, and also a concession that the individual is an artefact of the theory.

Internal Inconsistencies

• The state of nature is described twice — a condition of peace, goodwill and mutual assistance, and a condition that must be superseded because it is always in danger of tipping into war. The two are never reconciled.
• Human nature carries the same double. Men are rational enough to live by natural law without a state, and partial enough that they cannot be trusted to judge their own cases.
• Consent is required and then dispensed with. Express consent alone makes a member; tacit consent is then stretched until almost anything counts.
• Property is natural and then conventional. It arises before government and beyond its reach, yet money — a convention — gives it its final shape.
• Rights are inalienable and yet transferred. Men do not give up life, liberty or property, yet the state may take life for crime, restrain liberty by law and take property by taxation.
• Sovereignty is located in four places at once, as Sabine showed, each with a claim to be ultimate.
• The generous reading is that these are the costs of honesty: Locke described a complicated reality without a reductionist method, and untidiness is the price of that refusal.
• The severe reading is that they are unresolved contradictions permitting any interpreter to find the Locke he came looking for — which explains the extraordinary spread of readings the text has generated.

The Indian Anchor

Article 21 and the Expansion of Life and Liberty

• Article 21 — no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law — is the Lockean trio compressed into one provision, with property removed and later relocated.
• The framers deliberately chose “procedure established by law” over “due process”, on advice given to the drafting committee, in order to keep courts out of substantive review of legislation.
• The Court initially honoured that choice. A. K. Gopalan read Article 21 narrowly, holding that any procedure enacted by a competent legislature sufficed.
• Maneka Gandhi reversed it. The procedure must be right, just and fair, and not arbitrary, fanciful or oppressive — which reads due process back into Article 21 through Articles 14 and 19.
• This is Locke’s proposition in Indian constitutional form: a law failing the test of reasonableness is not law at all, whatever its formal pedigree.
• The subsequent expansion is enormous — livelihood, health, shelter, education, clean environment, dignity, speedy trial, and in K. S. Puttaswamy a fundamental right to privacy, which is self-ownership in the modern register.
• Article 19 carries the same structure — speech, association and movement stated as pre-existing rights, with the state permitted only reasonable restrictions, the constitutional descendant of Locke’s insistence that positive law answer to a standard outside itself.

The Property Saga: From Fundamental Right to Constitutional Right

India’s constitutional history of property is the longest-running quarrel with Locke in any democracy, and it ran in one direction.

Stage	Instrument	Effect
1950	Articles 19(1)(f) and 31	Property a fundamental right; compensation for acquisition
1951	First Amendment	Adds Articles 31A and 31B and the Ninth Schedule to shield zamindari abolition
1955	Fourth Amendment	Answers Bela Banerjee; makes adequacy of compensation non-justiciable
1964	Seventeenth Amendment	Widens “estate”; adds more land-reform laws to the Ninth Schedule
1971	Twenty-fifth Amendment	Replaces “compensation” with “amount”; inserts Article 31C immunising laws under Articles 39(b) and 39(c)
1973	Kesavananda Bharati	Upholds 31C’s first limb, strikes the clause ousting review, establishes the basic structure doctrine
1978	Forty-fourth Amendment	Repeals Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31; inserts Article 300A — property becomes a constitutional and legal right, not a fundamental right

• The driving conflict was land reform. Zamindari abolition, ceilings on holdings and bank nationalisation all required taking property, and a justiciable fundamental right made every measure litigable.
• State of West Bengal v. Bela Banerjee held compensation must be a just equivalent, provoking the Fourth Amendment; R. C. Cooper struck down bank nationalisation on compensation grounds, provoking the Twenty-fifth.
• Golak Nath held that fundamental rights, property included, could not be abridged by amendment — a Lockean holding, placing rights beyond the ordinary constituent power.
• The Forty-fourth Amendment ended the war, and the irony is complete: it was passed by the government elected to restore civil liberties after the Emergency, and the right it removed was the one Locke thought most fundamental.
• Article 300A now provides that no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law — wording that deliberately echoes Article 21 while withholding fundamental-right status.

Article 300A and the Vidya Devi Line

• The Court has spent two decades restoring judicially much of what the Forty-fourth Amendment removed textually.
• Vidya Devi v. State of Himachal Pradesh is the anchor. An elderly illiterate widow’s land was taken in the late 1960s to build a road, with no acquisition proceedings and no compensation, and she learned of her rights only decades later.
• The Court held the right to property is both a constitutional right and a human right, that the state may interfere only for a public purpose and on reasonable compensation, and that a welfare state cannot invoke adverse possession to perfect title over a citizen’s land.
• It refused to apply delay and laches to a continuing constitutional violation, and directed compensation with statutory benefits and interest — a Lockean remedy in administrative-law clothing.
• Kolkata Municipal Corporation v. Bimal Kumar Shah went further, holding that Article 300A contains seven sub-rights, without any one of which a deprivation is not “by authority of law”.
  • Notice of the intention to acquire; hearing of objections; a reasoned decision on them.
  • A demonstrated public purpose; restitution or fair compensation.
  • An efficient and timely process; and conclusion — proceedings must culminate in final vesting.
• This is due process reconstructed inside a provision drafted to exclude it, and it is as close as Indian law comes to Locke’s rule that a man may not be deprived of his property except by consent expressed through law.
• The legislative frame is the 2013 land acquisition statute, which replaced the colonial law with consent thresholds, social impact assessment and rehabilitation entitlements — an acknowledgment that compulsory acquisition without consent is a wrong requiring justification.

Kesavananda and the Basic Structure as a Lockean Limit

• Kesavananda Bharati holds that Parliament’s amending power under Article 368 does not extend to destroying or damaging the basic structure of the Constitution.
• The structural parallel is exact. The legislature is supreme within the constitution and beneath it, holds a delegated power for specified ends, and cannot transfer or destroy the power it holds.
• Locke’s fourth limit — that a delegated legislative cannot delegate — is the basic structure doctrine in seventeenth-century vocabulary.
• The Court occupies the position Locke left vacant. Where he could offer only the appeal to heaven against a legislature in breach, Indian constitutionalism supplies a judicial forum, converting revolution into litigation.
• Minerva Mills completed the argument by striking down the attempt to make the amending power unlimited, reasoning that a limited power cannot enlarge itself into an unlimited one — pure trust logic.
• The people remain the ultimate constituent power, and the Constitution’s “We, the People” is the Indian statement that authority derives from those governed by it.

The Right to Revolt in a Constitutional Order

• A constitutional democracy converts the right of revolution into rights of dissent, and Locke would have recognised the exchange as a good one.
• Article 19(1)(a) and (b) — speech and peaceful assembly — are the institutional form of the claim that a people may call rulers to account without arms.
• Locke insisted resistance need not be violent, because rational men resolve disputes by argument. This is why freedom of speech is constitutive of a liberal order rather than decorative in it.
• The dissolution triggers have constitutional analogues. Preventing the legislature from meeting, altering electoral machinery without consent, and substituting arbitrary will for standing law are recognisably the grounds on which the Emergency is now judged.
• The Constitution supplies no right of revolution and could not. Its substitutes are judicial review, periodic elections, federalism and the basic structure doctrine — remedies short of the appeal to heaven, which is what constitutional government is for.
• Ambedkar’s warning in his final address is the necessary qualification: once constitutional methods are available, unconstitutional methods — the grammar of anarchy — must be abandoned.

Toleration and Indian Secularism

• Indian secularism is not the Lockean wall of separation, and the difference is the most instructive comparison in this section.
• Locke’s model is separation. The state confines itself to civil interests, the church is a voluntary society, and neither enters the other’s sphere.
• The Indian model is sarva dharma sambhava — equal respect for all faiths — which requires the state to engage with religion rather than withdraw from it.
• Articles 25 to 28 carry the scheme: freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation (Article 25); freedom to manage religious affairs (26); freedom from taxation to promote a religion (27); freedom from religious instruction in wholly state-funded institutions (28).
• The Lockean elements are all present. Article 25 is subject to public order, morality and health — Locke’s civil-interest limit; Article 27 is the fiscal separation he demanded; Article 28 is his objection to coerced belief.
• The departures are equally clear. Article 25(2)(b) empowers the state to throw open Hindu religious institutions to all classes, and Article 17 abolishes untouchability — the state entering religion to reform it, which Locke’s magistrate has no warrant to do.
• The justification for the departure is Indian rather than Lockean. Where religion is itself a source of civil disability, a magistrate confined to civil interests must intervene in religion, because the civil injury is inflicted by religious practice.
• Locke’s exclusions have no Indian counterpart. Freedom of conscience covers the atheist, and no faith is excluded for foreign allegiance — a point on which the Indian document is plainly more Lockean in spirit than Locke was.

The Moderates and Lockean Constitutionalism

• The early Congress moderates — Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea, M. G. Ranade — argued in an explicitly Lockean idiom.
• Their method was constitutional agitation: petitions, memorials, resolutions, evidence before commissions, appeals to the conscience of the British Parliament.
• Their premise was that authority is limited by the ends it serves, and that British rule had broken faith with its own professed principles — a trust argument, not a nationalist one.
• Naoroji’s drain theory is Lockean at its root: a government transferring the wealth of the governed abroad has ceased to act for the good of the governed and forfeits its claim.
• The demand for representative institutions tracks Locke’s insistence that property may not be taxed without consent — no taxation without representation, made in Bombay rather than Boston.
• The extremists broke with them over remedy, not principle. When the appeal to the trustee failed, the argument moved to the question Locke left open: who shall judge, and what follows.

Ambedkar, Gandhi and Lockean Property

• Neither of India’s two greatest thinkers accepted the Lockean settlement on property, and their reasons differ instructively.
• Ambedkar’s objection: formal rights are empty without material conditions.
  • His States and Minorities proposed state ownership of key industries and of agriculture, with land cultivated collectively and capital supplied by the state — the opposite of a night-watchman state.
  • He held that political democracy without social and economic democracy cannot survive, and that liberty without equality produces the supremacy of the few over the many.
  • The Directive Principles are the constitutional answer — an instruction to secure equitable distribution of material resources and to prevent concentration of wealth, which names Lockean accumulation as a public problem.
  • He accepted the Lockean form and rejected the Lockean content: constitutional government, enforceable rights and limited power, with the state as an agent of transformation rather than a watchman over existing holdings.
• Gandhi’s objection is moral rather than structural.
  • Aparigraha — non-possession — holds that a man should not acquire beyond his immediate requirement, because amassing wealth degrades character.
  • Asteya — non-stealing — makes surplus accumulation a form of theft, since holding more than one needs deprives others of their share.
  • “The earth has enough to satisfy everybody’s need, but not enough to satisfy anybody’s greed.” This is the sufficiency proviso restated as an ethical absolute, refusing the exemption money buys in Locke.
  • Trusteeship is his constructive alternative: the rich hold wealth as trustees for society. Locke’s trust binds the government; Gandhi’s binds the property owner — the same metaphor turned on the other party.
  • Bread labour requires everyone to do physical work to compensate for what they consume, restoring the labour-title link that Locke severed when he permitted wage labour.
• The Constitution is the compromise between them and Locke. It protects property, subjects it to reasonable restriction and acquisition for public purposes, and directs the state towards distribution — and the Forty-fourth Amendment records which side won.

Contemporary Relevance

The Property Question Reopened

• Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra put the deepest question in Indian property law before a nine-judge bench: whether privately owned property is a “material resource of the community” under Article 39(b).
• The majority held that not all private property qualifies, expressly departing from Justice Krishna Iyer’s broad dictum in Ranganatha Reddy and its endorsement in Sanjeev Coke.
• The test is contextual rather than categorical. Private resources may count depending on the nature of the resource, its scarcity, its consequences for the community and the concentration of its ownership — but the blanket socialist rule is gone.
• Justice Nagarathna partly concurred and Justice Dhulia dissented, holding the older view right and the Constitution’s economic philosophy not the Court’s to update.
• The Lockean reading is direct. The pendulum that swung away from pre-political property has swung part of the way back, and the Court has restored a presumption in favour of the private holder.

Where Locke Is Still the Operative Theory

• Constitutional design. Written constitutions, bills of rights, enumerated powers and judicial review all instantiate the proposition that government holds delegated power for specified ends.
• Libertarian political economy. The Nozickian minimal state, opposition to redistributive taxation as forced labour, and the entitlement conception of justice are Locke’s fifth chapter carried into modern argument.
• Indigenous land claims. The colonial critique has practical force in litigation over aboriginal title, where the doctrine that unimproved land is vacant is precisely what indigenous plaintiffs must defeat.
• Self-ownership in new domains. Bodily autonomy, organ markets, surrogacy and property in one’s own personal data are all argued in the vocabulary Locke supplied — whether a person owns what his body and mind produce.
• Religious freedom. The distinction between civil interest and the care of souls remains the workable principle wherever a state must regulate religious practice without adjudicating religious truth.
• The right to resist. Whenever an executive obstructs a legislature, alters electoral machinery without consent, or substitutes decree for standing law, the diagnostic categories reached for are Locke’s, whether or not he is named.

The Continuing Argument About What He Was

• The Locke question has not been settled. Recent scholarship still divides between the constitutionalist Locke, the possessive-individualist Locke, the Christian Locke and the colonial Locke.
• The colonial reading is currently ascendant, and the honest response is neither to dismiss it as anachronism nor to let it displace everything else the text does.
• The best summary of the interpretive situation is the oldest one: there is probably some truth in each reading, and forcing the philosophy onto a single label costs it not only its richness but its identity.
• What survives every reading is the structure — rights before the state, power held on trust, consent as the ground of legitimacy, and a remedy against those who break faith.

Conclusion

Locke’s achievement is not a doctrine but an architecture. He took the individual, gave him rights no government conferred, made government a trustee accountable to the people who created it, and supplied a remedy when the trust was broken. Every constitutional state since has been built inside that frame, whatever it has done with the furniture.

The criticisms are not marginal and they do not cancel the achievement. Macpherson is right that the property chapter licenses what it claims to limit; Pateman is right that the contract rests on a domestic sphere it never examines; Parekh, Tully and Arneil are right that the labour theory did colonial work and that its author was a colonial administrator.

What follows is not dismissal but a recognition. Locke’s own principles are the strongest instrument against Locke’s own practice — the doctrine that men are equal, that authority requires consent, and that power used without right is a state of war.

That doctrine has since been used to extend the franchise, to end slavery, to decolonise, and to claim rights he would never have granted. That a theory outruns its author is the best evidence it was worth having, and it is why a book written to unseat a Stuart king remains the first place to look whenever a government claims a power it was never given.