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.
Just some thoughts about liberty messaging. It’s widely available and usually free. You can find pro-liberty commenters across the whole spectrum, from hardcore anarchists to relatively soft and cuddly pro-freedom voices.
Yet less than one person in a hundred actually is convinced.
Why?