# Two Treatises of Government The text that **made democracy thinkable** — [[John Locke]]'s 1689 argument that political authority derives from the consent of the governed, that individuals possess natural rights no government can legitimately violate, and that when government betrays its trust the people have the right to replace it. The *Two Treatises* is the philosophical source code of the American founding — Jefferson drew directly from Locke when writing the Declaration of Independence — and remains the bedrock text of liberal democratic theory. ## The Argument ### First Treatise: Destroying Divine Right The First Treatise demolishes Robert Filmer's *Patriarcha*, which argued that kings derive authority from Adam's God-given dominion. Locke's refutation is thorough and final: there is no scriptural or rational basis for hereditary absolute authority. Political power does not flow from God through kings to subjects. This matters because divine-right arguments are resurging in Christian nationalist theology — the claim that governmental authority is divinely ordained and that rulers are accountable to God rather than to the governed. ### Second Treatise: Building the Alternative The Second Treatise constructs the positive theory: **[[State of Nature]]:** Human beings exist in a pre-political condition of natural freedom and equality, governed by natural law (reason). No one has natural authority over anyone else. **Natural Rights:** Individuals possess inherent rights to life, liberty, and property — rights that exist *prior* to government, not because government grants them. **The Social Contract:** Government is created by consent — people agree to surrender some natural liberty in exchange for the protection of their remaining rights. Government authority is *delegated*, not inherent. **The Right of Revolution:** When government systematically violates the rights it was created to protect, the people have the right — and ultimately the duty — to alter or abolish it. This is not rebellion against legitimate authority; it is the reassertion of the authority that was always the people's. **Property Theory:** Locke's labor theory of property — that individuals own what they mix their labor with — has been used (and distorted) by libertarians to argue against taxation and redistribution. But Locke included a critical proviso: acquisition is legitimate only when "enough and as good" is left for others. The libertarian reading strips the proviso. ## How This Is Under Attack | Lockean Principle | Attacker | The Attack | |------------------|----------|------------| | **Consent of the governed** | [[Curtis Yarvin]] / NRx | Democracy is a failed experiment; replace consent with authoritarian efficiency | | **Natural equality** | Race realism / HBD | Biological hierarchy as natural order — the pre-Lockean worldview reasserted with pseudoscientific vocabulary | | **Right of revolution** | Selective application | The right invokes revolutionary rhetoric against democratic government while using state power to crush protest | | **Property proviso** | Libertarianism / Rand | Strip Locke's "enough and as good" qualification; property rights become absolute and unlimited | | **Against divine right** | Christian nationalism | Reasserting divinely ordained authority — the exact claim Locke's First Treatise destroyed | | **Government by trust** | [[Peter Thiel]] / anti-democratic right | Government as a problem to be eliminated, not a trust to be honored | ## See Also - [[John Locke]] — The author - [[Social Contract Theory]] — The tradition Locke defined - [[Natural Rights]] — The framework Locke established - [[Consent of the Governed]] — The principle at the heart of the Second Treatise - [[Thomas Jefferson]] — Locke's most consequential student - [[The Social Contract]] — Rousseau's radical extension of Locke