Tag: liberty

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 14, Analysis and Critique

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/

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapters 12 and 13

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.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 11

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.

This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapters 9 and 10

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

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 8

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

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 7

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.

This video is available on Odysee, YouTube, and BitChute.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 6

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.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapter 5

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.

This video is available on YouTube, Odysee, and BitChute.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapters 3 and 4

In chapters three and four of Locke’s Second Treatise, he covers The State of War (inside and outside of the context of society), and Slavery.

He makes a few strange arguments here, so bear with me as I try to work through them and provide some context.

One very interesting point is that, for Locke, the primeval state of man (pre-government) consists of some mixture of the State of Nature and the State of War. In short, Locke’s State of Nature has a different scope from, say, Hobbes’s.

This video is available on Odysee, BitChute, and YouTube.

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Locke’s Second Treatise, Chapters One and Two

Finally finished the first part of this summary, analysis, and critique of Locke’s Second Treatise. This part covers chapters 1 and 2, the Introduction and Locke’s explanation of the State of Nature.

It’s worth noting that Locke borrows his concept of the Law of Nature from Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which can be found here.

My perspective is that Locke doesn’t get enough credit for his work toward describing and understanding a limited government. Too much of Rousseau’s perversion of Locke has made its way into the philosophical zeitgeist, and has led people to believe Locke’s State of Nature is idyllic.

It is not.

In addition to summarizing and analyzing Locke’s work, I’m going to be going through the whole Treatise and pointing out where Locke’s efforts toward a limited form of government fails from a voluntaryist perspective.

This video (and others in the series) will be available on YouTube, Odysee, and BitChute.