Two Treatises of Government

What It Is

Two works in one volume, published in 1689 and long assumed to have been written to justify the revolution of the previous year. Peter Laslett's editorial detective work showed otherwise: most of it was composed around 1679 to 1683, when Locke was in the circle of the Earl of Shaftesbury, plotting against a king who was still very much on the throne. That is not a footnote. It changes the book from a piece of after-the-fact justification into an argument for resistance, written by a man who then had to flee to Holland.

The First Treatise is a book-length demolition of Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which had argued that kings inherit their authority in an unbroken line from Adam. It is patient, forensic and sardonic.

The Second Treatise is the one that reshaped the world: the state of nature, natural rights, property acquired through labour, government by consent, and the right of a people to remove a government that has broken its trust.

Why It Matters

Jefferson lifted its cadences almost intact. Life, liberty and estate becomes life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the sentence about the consent of the governed is Locke with the serial numbers filed off. The constitutional settlements of Britain and America, the language of human rights, and every modern argument about the limits of what a state may do to you run back through this book.

Read it against Hobbes and you have the two halves of the modern political argument. Both begin from a state of nature. They disagree completely about what people are like when they get there, and everything else follows from that disagreement.

It also has to be read with its trouble. Locke's chapter on property, which grounds ownership in the labour a man mixes with the land, was used to justify the seizure of land in the Americas on the grounds that nobody there was working it properly. Locke held shares in the Royal African Company and had a hand in drafting the constitutions of Carolina. The gap between what he wrote and what he did is one of the largest in the history of philosophy, and pretending otherwise is not scholarship.

Before You Read

The Second Treatise is about 150 pages and six to eight hours. The prose is clear, patient, and repetitive on purpose. Locke is arguing a case, and he expects a hostile reader.

The First Treatise is another hundred-odd pages of scriptural argument against a man nobody now reads. Most first-time readers skim it, and that is defensible.

Most people read the Second Treatise and call it Locke. That is not wrong. It is also not the same thing as having read the book.

Which Edition to Read

• Peter Laslett (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) — recommended. The standard scholarly text, established from Locke's own corrected copy, and the edition that settled when the book was written and what it was for. Laslett's introduction is a landmark in its own right, and the notes make sense of a seventeenth-century argument that would otherwise be opaque. The cost: the introduction runs well past a hundred pages and is written for specialists, and the annotation assumes you care about Restoration politics. View on Amazon →
• Ian Shapiro (Yale University Press, 2003). Prints the Treatises with the Letter Concerning Toleration and three interpretive essays, which makes it the best single volume for a reader who wants the argument and the modern quarrel about it together. The cost: the text is not as authoritatively established as Laslett's, and the essays reflect their moment.
• C. B. Macpherson (Hackett, 1980). The Second Treatise alone, cheap, with a short and forceful introduction. The most practical way to read the part that matters. The cost: no First Treatise, and Macpherson's Marxist reading of Locke shapes the framing more than a first-time reader may realise.

Take Laslett if you want the real book. Take Macpherson if you want the argument on a train.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read Hobbes first if you can manage it. Locke is answering him on nearly every page without ever naming him.

Read Chapter 5, on property, twice. It is the most consequential twenty pages Locke wrote, the most contested, and the place where the whole system either holds or gives way.

Count how often he uses the word trust. It is doing far more work than it looks, and the moment you notice how much, the argument sharpens.

Read Laslett's introduction afterwards; it is a scholarly argument about the book rather than a door into it. And do not read the Treatises as a description of how governments actually behave. They are an argument about when a people may stop putting up with one.