John Locke is the father of liberalism. Explain. (2018, 20 Marks)
John Locke (1632–1704) is called the father of liberalism because his Two Treatises of Government (1689) and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) turned the revolt against Stuart absolutism into a general theory of limited government. Others had spoken of natural right; Locke made rights the limit and purpose of political power.
The Liberal Architecture Locke Supplied
| Idea | Locke’s formulation | Liberal legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Natural rights | In the state of nature reason forbids harming another’s life, health, liberty or possessions: a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence (§6) | Rights prior to the state |
| Consent | Against Robert Filmer‘s divine-right Patriarcha, authority rests on the agreement of free and equal men | Popular sovereignty |
| Limited government | Men surrender only the power to enforce natural law; the legislature holds only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends (§149) | Government as trust, rule of law, separation of powers (completed by Montesquieu) |
| Property | Mixing one’s labour with nature creates title, within the spoilage and “enough and as good” provisos; the chief end of government is preserving property, meaning lives, liberties and estates (§§123–124) | Market society, protected ownership |
| Toleration | The care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate; the church is a voluntary society | Separation of church and state |
| Revolution | A government that breaks its trust dissolves itself, and the people shall be judge (§240) | Right to resist; the American Declaration of Independence (1776) |
The state merely remedies the inconveniences of nature (no settled law, impartial judge or enforcement), so it is an umpire, later caricatured as a night-watchman. Law serves liberty: where there is no law, there is no freedom (§57). And since society outlives its government, revolution does not mean anarchy.
The Indian Constitutional Echo
- “We, the People” restates authority by consent; Article 21, read in Maneka Gandhi (1978) to require a procedure right and just and fair, denies arbitrary power the name of law.
- Articles 25–28 carry his civil-interest limit on religion, though Indian secularism is equal respect, not separation.
- Kesavananda Bharati (1973) supplies a court where Locke offered only an “appeal to heaven”.
- On property India broke with him: the 44th Amendment (1978) demoted it to Article 300A. Yet in Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (5 November 2024) a nine-judge bench held that not every private resource is a “material resource of the community”, swinging the pendulum partly back.
Limits of the Title
- Thomas Hobbes‘s Leviathan (1651) first derived authority from individual right and consent; Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953) named him liberalism’s founder. Only his absolutism disqualifies him.
- C. B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) reads Locke as the ideologue of possessive individualism. Locke dissolves his own limits on accumulation and assumes a propertied citizenry: father of bourgeois liberalism, not of democracy.
- John Rawls rejects that premise: talents are partly luck, so the difference principle tempers ownership. Mahatma Gandhi‘s trusteeship asks the rich to hold wealth for society.
- J. S. Mill (On Liberty, 1859) supplied the theory of individuality that Locke only sketched, and T. H. Green the positive freedom of modern liberalism.
- The toleration excluded atheists and Catholics. Barbara Arneil (John Locke and America, 1996) shows the labour theory treating Amerindian land as “waste” open to colonists.
Conclusion
Locke is the father of liberalism in its architecture: rights before the state, power held on trust, consent, toleration and resistance. He is not its sole or final author: Mill, Green and Rawls rebuilt its ideas of liberty and equality, but inside Lockean walls.