John Locke, Second Treatise

Posted: Mon, Nov 24, 2025

The state of nature: The “natural” state of human existence.

  • The methodology: Compare what human life is like in a world with and without a government -> Derive the justification as well as limits (if any) of government.

Hobbes’s analysis: Our natural state is a state of “war of every man against every man.”

  • Competition over resources ⇒ conflict (I want what you have) ⇒ attack.
  • Distrust (wait a minute, you also want I have!) ⇒ attack first.
  • Our “glory” or pride ⇒ mutual contempt (you don’t value me as much as I value myself, and vice versa) ⇒ we fight.
  • Living in the state of nature: “The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
  • Reason asks us to seek peace ⇒ this requires everyone to agree to lay down his natural right to do whatever is necessary to preserve his life (esp. killing, harming others) ⇒ the only way to make this work is if there is a common power to hold all of us “in awe” ⇒ a social contract backed up by public rather than private use of coercive force.
  • For Hobbes, because the state of nature is so bad, even an awful government is preferable to no government at all.

Locke disagrees: The state of nature is not perfect but still quite peaceful (even marriage!); there are governments (e.g., absolute monarch) worse than the state of nature and so unjustified.

And here we have the plain difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which however some men have confounded, are as far distant, as a state of peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation, and a state of enmity, malice, violence and mutual destruction, are one from another. Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. (sec. 19)

There may be occasional wars between persons to settle such disputes in the absence of a common judge, but this is not a constant state of war. For political authority to be justified, we must freely consent to government as our collective solution to the serous “inconveniences” of a lack of established/publicized laws, impartial judges, and safe enforcement of rights.

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. (sec. 87)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (Declaration of Independence)

Locke on property: How (if ever) do things that exist in nature become ours?

He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. No body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. (sec. 28)

The idea: By mixing my labor with something not yet owned/belonging to all humans in common, that thing becomes mine.

  • By picking up the acorn, it becomes mine.
  • Two constraints: I can take only “as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils” and must leave “enough, and as good” for others.
    • “No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good [drink], who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst.”
  • Money, which gets around the spoiling problem, enables us to keep “a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth.”
  • Colonialism: “Thus in the beginning all the world was America” (sec. 49); “a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England” (sec. 41).