This is it! The final chapter of Locke’s Second Treatise, “Of the Dissolution of Government.” Here, Locke covers a variety of ways that a government or a society can fail, and tries to explain under what circumstances a people forming a society may toss out their existing government and create a new one.
Tag: voluntaryism
These two chapters cover two ways in which governments can make themselves illegitimate: through usurpation and tyranny.
Locke is careful to separate the two terms, so that usurpation is specifically the transfer of power to one entitled to it (even if that one restricts himself to similar powers and functions as the legitimate government).
Chapter 16, “Of Conquest” finally gets to the details of the hypothetical “just conqueror,” and covers Locke’s ideas of the restrictions and requirements for a conqueror to maintain the legal/moral high ground.
Some of the argumentation in this chapter is a bit confusing, so I start out with Locke’s summary at the end of the chapter, and then return to the more nuanced discussions after that.
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