Write approximately 150 words on Locke’s views on Revolution. (2024, 10 Marks)
John Locke sets out the right of resistance in chapter XIX, “Of the Dissolution of Government”, of the Second Treatise (1689). Peter Laslett dated most of the text to 1679–80, the Exclusion Crisis. It was therefore a case for resisting Charles II and his Catholic heir, not an apology written after 1688.
The Ground: Breach of Trust
- Consent and trust. Authority rests on the consent of the governed, and government holds only a fiduciary trust. It exists to secure life, liberty and estate.
- Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, and wherever law ends, tyranny begins. The government dissolves when the legislature is altered or blocked, when the executive abandons the laws, when the people are handed to a foreign power, or when rulers invade property and seek arbitrary power (§§212–222).
- The ruler is the rebel. Whoever uses force without right restores the state of war, so resisters are restorers of legality, not rebels.
Society Survives Government
Only foreign conquest dissolves society itself (§211). A breach of trust dissolves only the government, and power reverts to an intact community, which sets up a new legislature (§243). Revolution in Locke means changing rulers; it does not mean anarchy. The people shall be judge (§240). Where no earthly judge exists, the last resort is the appeal to heaven, meaning force answered by force.
Built-in Restraints
- People are not so easily got out of their old forms (§223), and they bear even great mismanagement patiently.
- Only a long train of abuses, which shows design rather than error, justifies resistance (§225).
- A known right to resist is the best fence against rebellion (§226), because it deters tyranny. This rests on a view of human reason more hopeful than Thomas Hobbes‘s.
Assessment
- Many commentators judge Locke no revolutionary. His remedy was restorative, and 1688 changed the monarch while leaving the social order untouched. Yet the American Declaration of Independence (1776) took up his long train of abuses.
- Limits. Locke never says who “the people” are in practice, and the French Revolution showed that a dissolved government can lead to terror rather than orderly resumption.
- Indian illustration. B. R. Ambedkar, closing the Constituent Assembly debates on 25 November 1949, urged dropping the grammar of anarchy once constitutional methods exist. The 1977 election removed the Emergency government by ballot: a Lockean resumption without arms. The 44th Amendment (1978) replaced “internal disturbance” with armed rebellion as a ground for emergency.
Conclusion
Locke made resistance a conditional, collective and restorative right. Constitutional democracy keeps its logic but turns the appeal to heaven into elections, courts and free speech.