By Ethan Hollander, Wabash College
States derive their power from a contract of sorts: an agreement by which people give the state a monopoly on the use of force, under the condition that the state then uses that power in certain ways. This way of thinking of state power is called social contract theory. John Locke was an important political philosopher closely associated with social contract thinking.
Siding with Democracy
Thomas Hobbes was an English political philosopher who had advocated for a powerful, centralized state authority—preferably a strong monarchy. Born in 1632, a generation after Hobbes, John Locke came of age at a time when the English parliament was already ascendant. In fact, Locke’s father had fought with the parliamentary forces in the English Civil War.
Locke himself was studying in London in 1649 when the English king Charles I was overthrown and beheaded. In other words, Locke—like Hobbes before him—had a front-row seat for the English Civil War. However, unlike Hobbes, who was sympathetic to monarchy, Locke and his family were predisposed to side with parliament and democracy, against the rule of a tyrannical king.
And this led Locke to provide a radical defense of limited government and individual rights.
This article comes directly from content in the video series Democracy and Its Alternatives. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Life in the State of Nature
Locke began by thinking of what human life would have been like in a state of nature. He got some of his inspiration by looking at America, which was just being settled by England at the time. Locke wrote, “In the beginning, all the world was America.”
In his eyes, one could look at Native Americans for a living example of what life was actually like in the state of nature. And as Locke saw it, life for the Native Americans wasn’t “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” as had been suggested by Hobbes before him. Yes, they were primitive in Locke’s eyes, but it wasn’t a constant state of war.
Locke also found biblical justifications for his notion that people in the state of nature had three basic rights: life, liberty, and property. To Locke, these were natural, God-given rights. People were born with them. And so, while people in the state of nature might have trouble exercising these rights, they nonetheless had them just by virtue of being human.
Role and Power of Government
Given Locke’s view of natural rights, it seemed reasonable to him that, if humans were to create a government to take them out of the state of nature, they’d only do so if the government they created agreed not to violate those rights. That’s because if the government did violate our rights, then we’d be no better off than we were in the state of nature.
In Locke’s view, people created government to secure the rights that they had but couldn’t exercise in the state of nature. And no one would consent to the creation of such a government if that government was just going to turn around and violate the very rights it was meant to secure!
This way of reasoning gives Locke a very different view on what governments are supposed to do, and on what constitutes a legitimate use of government power, compared to Hobbes.
Government Has Obligations
For Hobbes, as long as the government protected your life, it was doing what you created it to do. Hobbes’s state of nature was so terrible that even that minimum protection was better than the alternative.
For Locke, by contrast, the government wasn’t so much your sovereign as your servant. And as a result, it had a longer list of obligations that it had to provide in order to live up to its end of the contract.
And this is where Locke really gets radical: Since the social contract obligates the government to protect your natural rights, this means that if government ever violates those rights, it’s broken the contract, and you have the right to overthrow it.
Limiting the Power of the Government
And this is how Locke arrives at his notion that government should be limited—limited to protecting the rights that we created it to protect. And this is why the American Founding Fathers envisioned so many institutions that were devised to do just that: separation of powers, and checks and balances, and federalism, and the right to bear arms, and the right not to testify against yourself, and so on.
These things are meant to limit government power and ensure—at least as much as possible—that government is powerful enough to protect your rights, but not powerful enough to threaten them.
The American Declaration of Independence
Not surprisingly, the American revolutionaries loved John Locke. One can hear the words of John Locke when they read the American Declaration of Independence:
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. And that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.
That whenever any Government becomes destructive of those ends, it’s the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.
Far from demanding obedience to an all-powerful sovereign, Locke gives us a government so limited in power that if it oversteps its bounds, we have an obligation to rebel!
Common Questions about John Locke’s Approach to State Power
John Locke believed that people in the state of nature had three basic rights: life, liberty, and property. To Locke, these were natural, God-given rights. People were born with them. And so, while people in the state of nature might have trouble exercising these rights, they nonetheless had them just by virtue of being human.
In John Locke’s view, people created government to secure the rights that they had but couldn’t exercise in the state of nature. For him, the government wasn’t so much one’s sovereign as one’s servant. And as a result, it had a longer list of obligations that it had to provide in order to live up to its end of the contract.
To limit government power and ensure that government is powerful enough to protect one’s rights, but not powerful enough to threaten them, the American Founding Fathers envisioned many institutions that were devised to do just that: separation of powers, and checks and balances, and federalism, and the right to bear arms, and the right not to testify against yourself, and so on.
