from V - Natural law and utility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The political thought of John Locke is concerned with four problesms that every major political theorist faced in the seventeenth century. These are: a form of government that would not lead to oppression or civil war, an arrangement of religion wars, a set of applied arts of governing appropriate to the early modern mercantile states in a balance of power system, and the epistemic status of religious and political knowledge. This chapter is a survey of Locke’s response to the first two problems; sections i to vi consider the first and section vii the second (for an introduction to the latter two, see Tully 1988). Recent scholarship has shed indispendasble light on the political events and pamphlet literature in England which provided the immediate context of Locke’s writings on government and religion (Franklin 1978; Ashcraft 1980, 1986; Goldie 1980a, 1980b). In addition to this context, I will suggest, the political issues Locke confronted and the concepts he used were also part of a larger, European crisis in government and sustained theoretical reflection on it (Rabb 1975).
Government
The first problem is, what is government – its origin, extent, and end? It is classically posed in the subtitle of the Two Treatises of Government. Locke worked on this issue from the Two Tracts on Government (1660–1), to the Two Treatises (1681–9), moving from a solution of absolutism and unconditional obedience to one of popular sovereignty and the individual right of revolution. The question is not about the nature of the state as a form of power over and above rulers and ruled, although he was familiar with this reason of state way of conceptualising early modern politics and sought to undermine it (TT, I.ix.93, p. 248, II.xiv.163, p. 394).
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