Explanation
Natural equality as the starting point
Locke makes political subordination something requiring justification. No one is born with an obvious title to rule another; authority must arise through a morally intelligible act or relationship.
Freedom is bounded by natural law
The state of nature permits self-direction but forbids arbitrary harm. Rights and duties therefore arise together: one’s liberty exists alongside equal claims held by others.
State of nature and state of war differ
The state of nature can contain peaceful cooperation. War arises from wrongful force and may continue within civil society when a ruler removes access to impartial law.
Property includes more than material possessions
Locke often uses property broadly for lives, liberties and estates. Government’s protective purpose cannot consequently be reduced to safeguarding wealth alone.
Labour and appropriation
Labour explains how something common becomes specially connected to one person. The argument remains controversial because labour may create value without necessarily establishing an unlimited claim to land.
Money transforms the original limits
Durable currency avoids spoilage and represents social consent to unequal holdings. Locke thereby links extensive accumulation to convention rather than treating every inequality as simply natural.
Consent creates political membership
Actual agreement supplies legitimacy, but tacit consent is more difficult. Enjoying roads or residing on land may generate obedience without showing a genuinely free choice to join.
Majority rule solves a problem of action
A community could not move as one body if unanimity were always required. Majority decision is presented as a practical implication of forming a collective, though minority rights still depend upon natural and constitutional limits.
Government is fiduciary
Political power is held in trust for specified ends. This language explains both authority and accountability: office-holders may act, but cannot turn entrusted power into private ownership.
Legislative supremacy is limited
The legislature is superior to ordinary governmental powers, not to natural law or the public purpose that created it. Its supremacy therefore differs from unlimited sovereignty.
Prerogative confronts unforeseen necessity
No legal code anticipates every emergency. Discretion can protect the public, but also provides the vocabulary of abuse. Locke’s answer is retrospective public judgement rather than a purely legal formula.
Conquest does not manufacture right
Locke separates success from legitimacy. Force may change possession, but it cannot erase the moral claims of innocent persons or convert aggression into lawful authority.
Tyranny is a mode of using power
A legitimate office-holder becomes tyrannical when power serves private will rather than public law. Tyranny is therefore possible under any governmental form.
The right of resistance
Resistance follows breach of trust rather than ordinary disagreement. Locke tries to make it a remedy against systematic subversion, not permission to reject every inconvenient law.
The tension of colonial application
The language of improvement and unused land was historically capable of being applied against peoples whose forms of possession differed from European agriculture. The theory’s universal equality should be tested against that legacy.
Locke and Hobbes
Both philosophers begin without established government and value security, but Locke preserves enforceable natural duties, divided governmental powers and a stronger public right to judge betrayal of trust.