I’ve been reading the essay collection Social Justice and the Indian Rope Trick by Anthony de Jasay, and despite his unusually opaque style of writing, there are definitely some interesting ideas here.
One that I’ve been playing around with has been his explanation of where the burden of proof must lie in determining whether an action is free or not.
Chapter 15 is mostly a short summary and restatement of Locke’s definitions of three different types of power.
However, there are a few nuggets of new ideas here:
1) Locke’s conception of “Despotical” power is not universally negative, as our use of despotic typically is today
2) The three different types of legitimate power here can be distinguished by how they occur: paternal by nature, political by consent, and despotical by forfeiture (due to legitimate self defense against an unjust invader)
3) The three different types of power differ in who they operate on: paternal operates between someone with property (the parent) on someone who is not yet capable of managing property, but will be eventually (the child); political operates between property holders; and despotical operates from a property owner upon one who has been stripped of the right to property.
This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Intro music adapted from a piece by Dvir Silver, courtesy Pixabay:
https://pixabay.com/users/sonican-38947841/
Chapter 14 of the Second Treatise is titled “On Prerogative,” and is perhaps the most dangerous concept in Locke’s idea of government, especially from a libertarian or voluntaryist perspective.
According to Locke, prerogative is the ability of the executive to promote the public good without a rule. However, the notion of the executive having powers not strictly limited where the law is “silent” is a dangerous notion, prone to all sorts of bad incentives, which even Locke admits.
Furthermore, we get to see an interesting application of prerogative and how the American founders seem to have actually improved on Locke’s thought, in the notion of eminent domain. It sounds crazy, especially from our voluntaryist perspective, but I explain in detail in the video.
This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
Intro music adapted from a royalty-free piece by Clavier Music, courtesy of Pixabay.
https://pixabay.com/users/clavier-music-16027823/
Chapters 12 and 13 of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government cover the executive and federative powers, their goals, and their limitations.
The chief point to remember when reading this chapter is that the legislature is supreme insofar as it serves the ends for which the people created it, but the people (in a Lockean system) maintain the power of altering or abolishing the legislature should it fail to serve their purposes.
At long last, Locke is getting around to outlining the limits of proper government. He’s hinted at many of these limitations in earlier chapters, but he tries to lay them all out here at once, even at the risk of being repetitive.
Unfortunately, we find a few instances of sloppy or open-ended language in this chapter that leave significant openings for a government to change from something at least somewhat legitimate into a downright tyranny.
Locke reminds us over and over that the Society/Commonwealth must be better than the State of Nature, but he hasn’t offered us many ways to deal with tyranny other than to make sure it doesn’t happen! He’ll cover tyranny in a later chapter, but the language here gives the government a few dangerous openings and offers it far too great a sense of permanence.
Intro music edited from “Price of Freedom” by Zakhar Valaha, royalty-free via Pixabay.
Today we’re covering two short chapters: “Of the Ends of Political Society and Government,” and “Of the Forms of a Commonwealth.”
Both cover fundamental issues of Locke’s concept of proper government, so I would argue that they should have appeared much earlier in the book.
Aside from that, they help to clarify a few things that I’ve been harping on but Locke declined to address specifically until now.
“Of the Ends of Political Society and Government” lists the proper roles of governments, what freedoms people joining governments must give up, and what the responsibilities of those vested with governmental power are.
“Of the Forms of a Commonwealth” clarifies several acceptable forms of Locke’s conception of government, based on the choices of the majority as to whom, if anyone, legislative power should be delegated.
Mentioned article:
“The Myth of the Rule of Law” by John Hasnas
http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/SOC/3568/Bench/myth.pdf
Chapter 8 is titled “Of the Beginning of Political Societies” and attempts to argue logically how at least some governments must have appeared due to people banding together voluntarily for their common defense.
Locke tries to explain how the leadership he often observed in his day and in history developed, and how older monarchies differed from ones around his time.
I won’t say that his arguments are airtight, but if we take care to understand how the scope of Locke’s “state of nature” differs from Hobbes’s, Locke does in fact make some good points.
Locke refers to a couple of historical sources that I managed to track down:
Jose de Acosta’s “Natural and Moral History of the Indies”
https://archive.org/details/naturalmoralhist00acos/page/n5/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/naturalmoralhist01acos/page/n9/mode/2up
“Justin,” a.k.a. Marcus Junianius Justinus Frontinus’s
“Epitome of Pompeius Trogus’s ‘Philippic Histories'”
https://www.attalus.org/info/justinus.html
Chapter 7 is titled “Of Political or Civil Society,” but that title is a little bit deceptive. It begins with a few more appeals to religious beliefs in the beginning, attempting to emphasize (again) that familial and master/servant relations fall short of what Locke terms “political power.”
However, the real meat of the chapter is Locke’s argument against absolute monarchy as an example of a civil society. In short, by taking ultimate judgment powers upon himself (even for matters concerning himself), an absolute monarch of any kind effectively puts himself into the state of nature with respect to his people.
It is a simple and clear argument for rebellion against any totalitarian state.
We have some more issues with Locke’s assumptions of horizontal integration of the various roles that states usually monopolize, and he’s definitely keeping his toe off of any line that might get him officially sanctioned by the English king at the time, but the elements of the argument are there and are convincing:
If the state fails to serve the people, then those people need not remain subjugated by it. The purpose of society is to improve man’s lot compared to the state of nature/war.
Chapter Six is titled “Of Paternal Power,” but actually it covers a bit more than that, seeking not only to explore the limits of paternal (or, as Locke might have it, “parental”) power and show how it differs from political power.
However, here we also find Locke deviating somewhat from his desired goal of a government by consent. He makes a few crucial assumptions and moves in the direction of “implied” consent, vis a vis allegiance to governments, although not to the degree that Rousseau pushed.
What we learn here is that the primary “implication” that leads to consent of governance is the ownership of land, but Locke has side-stepped any argument about why governments must maintain a monopoly on land ownership.
All this and more in the video, which is available at Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.
This chapter is titled “On Property,” and covers the most basic parts of Locke’s theory of property.
To summarize, man owns his labor and the stuff he mixes his labor with from out of the commons in the State of Nature.
However, the Law of Nature prohibits man from appropriating things and then wasting or destroying them.
In society, positive rules are created to handle the rules for ownership and transfer of property.
It’s here that Locke seems to dig himself into a bit of a hole, both by making some assumptions about the positive laws of society and about the tendency of man in the State of Nature to only appropriate that which he can cultivate.