John Locke (1632–1704) may be one of the most famous political theorists in the Anglo-American world not so much because of the quality of his thought, as for his impact on world events, since many of his ideas were taken as models by the founding fathers of the US Constitution. Like his great rival Thomas Hobbes, though slightly later, he was writing against the background of the English Civil War, and his own political connections were vital to the development of his political theory. Hobbes and Locke used much the same theoretical methodology: the discussion of a hypothetical state of nature and the idea of a social contract or compact to get out of this state into civil society. He was very much in the natural law tradition but, unlike Hobbes, his perception of natural law was much more orthodox. The main aim in his theories, set out in the First and Second Treatises on Civil Government, was to draw a blueprint for a political system in which the government would be severely limited in its role, and subject to control and even abolition by the citizenry were it to exceed the tight bounds he put on it. As with Rousseau later, he argued that sovereignty lay with the people, not with a monarch, and that governments had their authority only because the citizens consented to their rule to achieve specific benefits. Only the need for a greater protection of certain natural rights could be a good reason for consenting to leave the total liberty of a state of nature for membership of a state where some liberty would be lost, and hence endowing the state with authority.
At the same time, because he feared the growth of executive power, he insisted on a separation of powers between the legislature, the representative of the people’s sovereignty, and the executive.
Although he hinted at the further separation of the judicial system from the executive, this model of the separation of powers and of government acting in a trust capacity to achieve limited objectives went to the hearts of the newly-independent American politicians in the Constitutional Convention (as did similar arguments by Montesquieu, though his were later than Locke’s), and his influence is beyond doubt. Though his theory is, in its end result, an encapsulation of many modern liberal values, Locke himself was neither a democrat nor an advocate of equality. Indeed the principal value he wished the political system to preserve was the right to private property, which he defends with an odd but ingenious theological argument. He is quite clear in the Second Treatise that he does not expect the ordinary people to play any role in the running of the state, and his famous reliance on free consent to create authority in fact ends up, by sleight of hand, as being very much less liberal than it seems. Politically he was on what would pass as the left-wing of the period: his family had fought for Parliament in the Civil War, and his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was implicated in an attempted revolution against the restored monarchy. Some critics, indeed, regard the Second Treatise as, in part, an attempted justification of Shaftesbury’s position, and he certainly was unusual in writing into his theory a defence of the need occasionally to rebel against government. But the left-wing position of his day can more easily be seen as the intellectual support for the rise of the bourgeoisie, and his advocacy is indeed for the form of government and ideas on property particularly convivial to the development of laissez-faire economies. Probably his better intellectual work was as a philosopher, and in that capacity he is studied today almost as much as he is analysed as a political theorist.
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