Two Treatises of Government is John Locke's 1689 work of political philosophy. The First Treatise refutes the theory of the divine right of kings, and the Second Treatise argues that legitimate government arises from the consent of the governed to protect natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that a government which violates that trust may justly be resisted. It profoundly influenced later constitutional and revolutionary thought, including the American Declaration of Independence.
Facts
Key ProvisionThe First Treatise refutes Robert Filmer's argument for the divine and patriarchal right of kings; the Second Treatise argues that legitimate government arises from the consent of the governed to protect natural rights to life, liberty and property, and that a government which violates that trust may rightly be resisted and replaced. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Drafted By
Locke published the Two Treatises anonymously in 1689, only acknowledging authorship near the end of his life.
Influenced
In the Other Atlases
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Locke's Second Treatise (chapter 5) grounds property in labor mixed with land held in common, and singles out uncultivated land as effectively unclaimed ("waste") until improved. Scholars including James Tully and Barbara Arneil have argued this theory, whatever Locke's intent, supplied European colonists a ready philosophical justification for treating Indigenous land in the Americas as unowned and available for appropriation, since Indigenous land use did not always fit Locke's enclosure-and-cultivation model of labor. Other Locke scholars hold this reads a specific colonial application back into a general theory of property Locke did not frame around dispossession, and that the connection is drawn more by Locke's later readers than by the text itself.
A dissenting reading, from Postcolonial scholarship on Locke's labor theory of propertyLocke's Political Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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