On Two Treatises of Government

If you want to read the argument the Declaration of Independence is built on, nearly sentence for sentence, read Locke. The Second Treatise of Government is the source from which Jefferson drew the deep structure of the American founding: that government rests on the consent of the governed, that people carry natural rights into society rather than receiving them from the state, and that a government which betrays its trust may rightfully be replaced. To read Locke after reading the Declaration is to watch the founding document's foundations come into view.

Locke begins, as Hobbes did, with a state of nature, but he sees it very differently. For Locke the state of nature is governed by a law of nature, reason itself, which teaches that no one ought to harm another in life, liberty, or possessions. People are free and equal, and they hold these rights before and apart from any government. This is the hinge of the whole modern idea of rights: they are not gifts from a ruler that can be withdrawn, but possessions of the person that government exists to protect.

Government, then, is not a master but a trustee. People leave the inconveniences of the state of nature and form a political community for one main purpose, the better protection of the rights they already have, especially property, which Locke uses broadly to mean lives, liberties, and estates. Authority is granted conditionally, for that purpose, and held in trust.

From that premise comes the conclusion that made Locke dangerous to kings and indispensable to revolutionaries. If a government turns against the very rights it was established to protect, if it becomes arbitrary and lawless, it dissolves its own claim to obedience, and the people may resume the power they delegated and place it in new hands. This is not a recipe for chronic rebellion, Locke is careful to say people endure a great deal before they revolt, but a long train of abuses pursuing the same object reveals a design against their liberty, and then resistance becomes a right.

Read that sentence and then read the Declaration's account of a long train of abuses and usurpations. The borrowing is nearly literal. Jefferson was not inventing a justification for revolution. He was applying Locke's, in Locke's own terms, to a particular king.

The Second Treatise is public domain and freely available, and it is far more readable than its reputation suggests, direct, argued in plain steps, short. Read it next to the hosted Declaration of Independence in this library, and the conversation between the two becomes the clearest single lesson in where American government gets its ideas.