JOHN LOCKE

John Locke



John Locke

Part A

Political power is the power that every man in the state of nature possesses but which is given over to the society that they form: i.e., to the government set up to create an established and known set of laws, to arbitrate in disputes, and to preserve the life and property of its members. Locke's vision is thusly of a minimal state whose justification can only be that of consent (§176). The state must not possess arbitrary, absolute powers over the lives and property of the civilians, yet its mandate must seek the public good and be democratic (i.e., majority rule) (Harris 1994 pp.78-81).

This opens up issues. Locke's theory of the state of nature will thus be tied closely to his theory of natural law, since the latter defines the rights of persons and their status as free and equal persons. The stronger the grounds for accepting Locke's characterization of people as free, equal, and independent, the more helpful the state of nature becomes as a device for representing people. Still, it is important to remember that none of these interpretations claims that Locke's state of nature is only a thought experiment, in the way Kant and Rawls are normally thought to use the concept. Locke did not respond to the argument “where have there ever been people in such a state” by saying it did not matter since it was only a thought experiment. Instead, he argued that there are and have been people in the state of nature(Dunn 2003 pp.89-90). (Two Treatises 2.14) It seems important to him that at least some governments have actually been formed in the way he suggests. How much it matters whether they have been or not will be discussed below under the topic of consent, since the central question is whether a good government can be legitimate even if it does not have the actual consent of the people who live under it; hypothetical contract and actual contract theories will tend to answer this question differently.

First, historically, as Locke notes, “this Consent is little taken notice of: And therefore many have mistaken the force of Arms, for the consent of the people,” (§175). This does not undermine the theoretical justification of government - that it ought to be consensual, for earlier Locke stresses that adults have the right to secede from their present society to form a new one, therefore present occupation or de facto rule does not validate a government's status. However, it does raise wonderfully intricate problems for any incumbent regime that oversteps its boundaries and initiates force against the people it is supposedly seeking to protect(Filmer 1991 pp.31-32). It also tends to undermine the legitimacy of any regime not founded on consensual origins, as well as raises the question of how continual that consensus ought to be: should each generation renew its contract with its government body, and if it didn't would that not undermine any legitimacy the government possessed? Or should implied consensus ...