What the Second Treatise on Government Actually Argues
John Locke published the Second Treatise on Government in 1689, though it was backdated to 1688 on the title page. It is the foundational text for liberal constitutionalism, and most introductory philosophy courses treat it as the go-to reference for natural rights theory. The core argument runs through a series of chapters that build on each other. You start with the state of nature. You move into the state of war. Then you get to property, the social contract, and finally the right of revolution. Here is the part most people miss: Locke is not writing pure political theory. He is writing a justification for the Glorious Revolution. James II had been deposed, and William of Orange had taken the throne. Locke needed to explain why the English could remove a king without collapsing into chaos. That practical goal shapes almost everything in the text.
Reading Second Treatise On Government John Locke Without Buying Into Every Claim
The text has gone through roughly forty standard editions since the seventeenth century. If you want the original, the best public domain versions are available through Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the Locke Online project at University of California Berkeley. The Peter Laslett edition from Cambridge University Press remains the scholarly standard for anyone doing serious citation work. It includes extensive editorial notes and reconstructs the original manuscript drafts, which Locke revised multiple times before publication. People conflate Locke with Hobbes on the state of nature. They should not be conflated. Hobbes described life in the state of nature as nasty, brutish, and short. Locke described it as a state of perfect freedom and equality governed by natural law. People are not at war with each other constantly. They are free to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they see fit, within the bounds of natural law. Natural law, for Locke, is discoverable through reason. It teaches that no one ought to harm another in life, liberty, or estate. The executive power of natural law means every individual has the right to enforce it. That is the part that gets messy. When everyone is their own enforcer, disputes arise. People become partial to their own cases. Punishment tends to escalate beyond what is proportional. That is the primary inconvenience Locke identifies, and it is the engine that drives the whole argument forward.
Property Comes Before Government
Locke dedicates the bulk of the Second Treatise to property theory. Chapter five, sometimes called the Labor Theory of Property, argues that mixing your labor with unowned resources creates a property right. You pick an apple from a tree. The apple becomes yours because you put work into it. This seems straightforward until you actually try to apply it to anything complicated. Here is a practical problem I ran into when advising a client on intellectual property disputes involving open source software. The client wanted to argue that their modifications to a library constituted Locke-style labor mixing. The counterargument was that the original code had already been commingled with contributions from dozens of developers. Property boundaries in the digital realm do not map cleanly onto Locke's agricultural metaphors. The workaround was abandoning the natural rights framing entirely and grounding the claim in contractual license agreements instead. Locke was right about the principle. He was not helpful for the specific edge case.
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The Social Contract and Limited Government
Government arises when people consent to give up their executive power of natural law. They form a political community and establish a legislature to make laws. The government is a fiduciary trust. It exists to protect life, liberty, and estate. If the government violates that trust, the contract is broken. Power reverts to the people. This is where Locke gets dangerous in the hands of activists. The right of revolution is explicit in chapters eighteen through nineteen. A government that systematically undermines property, substitutes arbitrary rule for established law, or blocks legislative reform has effectively declared war on its own citizens. Locke argues resistance is not only permissible but sometimes obligatory. The complication is that Locke also warns against trivial or frequent rebellions. He wants the right of revolution to be a last resort, not a first response to policy disagreements. The bar he sets is deliberately high: a long train of abuses, a pattern rather than an incident. That ambiguity is what makes his theory both powerful and unstable.
Common Misreadings That Undermine Your Arguments
Many readers treat Locke as an absolute libertarian. He is not. His property theory includes the provisos that you must leave enough and as good for others, and that spoilation cannot exceed what one can use before it spoils. These limits matter. They also get ignored in contemporary political debates because they are philosophically difficult to operationalize. Another frequent mistake is treating the state of nature as a historical event. Locke presents it as a thought experiment, a theoretical baseline for understanding what government is for. He does occasionally reference actual state-of-nature conditions, particularly in discussing the Americas, but those references are inconsistent and reflect the assumptions of his era rather than careful ethnographic observation.
Where Locke's Framework Falls Apart
The right of revolution sounds satisfying in theory. In practice, it is almost impossible to determine collectively when the threshold has been met. Different factions will always disagree about whether grievances justify overthrowing a government. Locke anticipated this and seemed to expect that the judgment would rest with the people as a whole, but he never specified a mechanism for making that determination. That gap is fatal if you are trying to use his framework to resolve an actual political crisis. The property provisos also create enforcement problems. How do you measure whether you have left enough and as good for others in a competitive market? How do you prevent accumulation without a coercive authority, which Locke's framework seems to require but does not clearly provide for. These are not minor gaps. They are structural issues that later theorists spent centuries trying to patch.
What You Should Take From It
Locke's Second Treatise remains useful for understanding the intellectual foundations of limited government and individual rights. The argument structure is clear, and the historical context matters for interpreting specific passages. But treat it as one contribution to a long debate, not as a finished system. The gaps between his principles and practical application are real, and any modern argument that relies on Locke without acknowledging them is doing a disservice to the text and to its readers.
